Jewish and Christian kids visit Shoa museum
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Rabbi Eric Milgrim of Temple B’nai Shalom addresses students from St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church and his synagogue during their trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Photos by Bruce Tucker
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February 1, 2010
Middle school students from a synagogue and a church in East Brunswick traveled together to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and returned home to East Brunswick determined to fight the kinds of intolerance that resulted in the death of six million Jews.
The seventh- and eighth-graders from the religious school of Temple B’nai Shalom and the full-day school at St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church visited Washington on Jan. 18 — Martin Luther King Jr. Day — in a trip sponsored by the synagogue’s Daniel Pearl Education Center. Parents, advisers, and teachers went along.
The following night they gathered at the synagogue to share thoughts under the guidance of moderator David Litt, a member of the Pearl center committee. They also heard Polish Holocaust survivor Moshe Gimlan of Monroe speak of the loss of his entire family and his experience as a concentration camp prisoner (see sidebar).
“Unfortunately, you are now the survivors,” Litt told the youngsters. “You have the responsibility, the obligation to continue to tell their stories so these atrocities don’t exist in the future. In school when you see someone treat someone incorrectly, if you don’t stand up for them, who will?”
Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan (D-Dist.18), chair of the assembly’s education committee, started the program by saying he believed “every kid should visit the Holocaust Museum.”
“I believe learning tolerance should be a part of every child’s education.”
St. Bart’s student Alexis Consalvo, 13, of East Brunswick, admitted that going to the museum was “a really hard experience.”
“I was really surprised that people would go along with doing these horrible things,” she said. The lessons learned impressed on her the necessity for standing up “against intolerance and ignorance.”
Fellow St. Bart’s student Leon Tkacenko, 13, of North Brunswick said he found all the stories very moving. But he was particularly touched by the museum’s exhibits of shoes and other items belonging to the victims.
“It was very moving and upsetting and will very much change how I treat and think of others,” he said. “I also thought it was a good experience because we got to spend time with our Jewish neighbors.”
Twins Alex and Jacob Paul, 15, from B’nai Shalom, said although they knew about the Holocaust, the experience enhanced that knowledge.
Alex described the trip as “a mind-bomb so amazingly overwhelming” that it was “difficult to take in.” Jacob said it changed his perspective; “when you see it rather than reading text or seeing pictures, you really get a deeper understanding of what these people went through,” he said.
The Pearl Center was named in memory of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002 because he was Jewish.
Survivor relates horrors he witnessed
MOSHE GIMLAN of Monroe lived through what students from St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church and Temple B’nai Shalom saw when they visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The night after the trip, Gimlan, 89, described for the students how the Nazis began a systematic dehumanization of Jews from the moment they entered his hometown near Cracow in 1939. They forbade Jews from walking on the sidewalk and forced them into hard labor, repairing roads and cleaning stables without pay. Jewish businesses were confiscated.
“The Jews in Eastern Europe were wearing beards, so for fun they pulled out the beards with the flesh, and executed many without any reason,” he told the youngsters. Gimlan’s family was forced into the ghetto in 1942.
After he was sent that summer to work in a brick factory in Cracow, the ghetto was liquidated and its inhabitants, including six of Gimlan’s eight siblings, were sent to Treblinka and their deaths. The remaining brother and sister were sent to work in an ammunitions factory, where they, too, perished.
Gimlan was later sent to the Plaszow camp, made famous in the movie Schindler’s List, where he witnessed the barbarity of its commandant, Amon Goeth.
“From his balcony he used to shoot people, or even whenever he walked around in the camp,” said Gimlan. “In the film Schindler’s List, there is a scene that shows how he executed a woman engineer in front of a barrack after she brought to his attention that the barrack was not safe. I was a witness to it.”
He described pits where Jews were stripped and shot, hours-long early-morning roll calls in the freezing winter, starving prisoners shot for trying to smuggle in food, and public hangings.
As the Russian troops advanced in January 1945, Gimlan was among those sent to other camps, only to find they too were being evacuated as the Allies gained an upper hand on the Nazis. In April he and two other prisoners escaped from a “death march” in Bavaria, three days before the arrival of American troops.
After recovering from typhus in a German hospital, Gimlan went to Israel, where he fought in the War of Independence. In 1957, he immigrated to Brooklyn. The retired electrician moved from Carmel, NY, to Monroe 12 years ago.
“The survivors of my generation are dying,” said Gimlan. “We want to leave you young people the task of retelling the story to future generations.”
— DEBRA RUBIN
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