Millville family funds Stockton scholarship to honor Holocaust survivors

A Millville family has committed $25,000 to Stockton University to create the Sam and Elizabeth Roth Endowed Memorial Scholarship in Holocaust Studies, turning one South Jersey family’s survival story into permanent support for future students.

The gift will back Stockton’s Holocaust and Genocide Studies program and the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center, where Elizabeth Roth spent years sharing her experience with students from kindergarten through college. Because the scholarship is endowed, the Roth family’s contribution is designed to keep producing aid after the initial donation is made, giving the university a lasting funding stream for Holocaust education.

Samuel and Elizabeth Roth met and married after liberation, then immigrated to the United States in 1949. Stockton says Elizabeth’s parents and four siblings were murdered during the Holocaust. After arriving in South Jersey, the couple built a new life in Millville, first working on a poultry farm before going on to help establish Tower Hospitality.

Tower Hospitality now says it operates three award-winning Cumberland County hotels, and New Jersey Motorsports Park identifies the company as its exclusive hotel group and South Jersey’s largest hospitality company. An obituary for Elizabeth Roth said she and Sam raised three sons in Cumberland County and later developed several hotels and restaurants, including Denny’s and Hampton Inn properties. Their business footprint tied the family firmly to Cumberland County even as their personal history carried the memory of deportation, concentration camps, forced labor and death marches.

The new scholarship also extends a record Stockton has already built in Holocaust studies philanthropy. The university already has other memorial awards in the field, including the Catherine and Marcell Renny Holocaust Studies Memorial Endowed Scholarship, showing that the Roth gift joins an existing effort to support teaching and research on genocide and antisemitism.

Stockton had already preserved the family’s story in print in 2024 with a publication titled From Munkács to Millville: The Story of Holocaust Survivor Elizabeth Roth. Now, the scholarship gives that history a practical academic purpose in the same county where the Roths rebuilt their lives, raised their family and helped shape the region’s hospitality industry.