by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

February 19, 2009

Entering the elevator at Bruriah High for Girls in Elizabeth, visitors to Jewish Educational Center school last week were shocked to find themselves in a cramped, dark space, with what looked like a barred window and the silhouettes of people on the black paper plastered around them.

“It’s supposed to give the feeling of being in one of the cattle cars that took people to the concentration camps,” an 11th-grade student explained, smiling, yet serious, at the visitor’s reaction. “Of course, it was much more crowded for them.”

The altered elevator was the introduction to a “mini-museum” created by the 90 or so students in the school’s 11th-grade 20th-century history class, under the leadership of teacher Joel Glazer.

A firm believer that students learn more by doing than passively listening, he gave them one week to create the “museum.”

Each of the four classes involved tackled a different period — the lead-up to World War II, the Holocaust, Israel’s fight for independence, and the postwar era. Within each class, small groups took on specific tasks.

“They have different strengths,” Glazer said. “I wanted each of them to have the opportunity to do what they do best, and they really came through.”

Some students created fake newspaper pages headlining key events, while others designed and put up the displays. And some created artifacts — like very convincing sepia-toned identity documents or a replica of Anne Frank’s diary or a display case supposedly containing Raoul Wallenberg’s cigarette case. Two desks represented the difference between Adolph Hitler, with an army jacket to suggest his militarism, and President Franklin Roosevelt, with photos of his family and his dog and toys for his grandchildren.

Mission accomplished

The “museum” was on display all last week in the school’s second-floor hallway. Five girls were selected to be docents: Ayelet Bersson, Abby Chesir, Dahlia Garber, Avital Levine, and Leah Respler. With a shy pride, they took groups of students as well as teachers and outside visitors on tours through the exhibit, relating the facts and figures and theories pertaining to each section.

Separating the prewar section from the Holocaust part was an archway of letters spelling out “Arbeit Macht Frei” — “Work brings freedom” — like the notorious sign over the entrance to Auschwitz.

To complete the museum atmosphere, the students put up gold rope barriers attached to silver-painted posts, to protect the displays. On the floor, one section had a trail of yellow stars, like those Jews were forced by the Nazis to wear. The next part had commemorative “tiles” pasted on the floor.

The docents admitted that they probably learned more than anyone else. They each took part in creating different sections but could also provide commentary on the entire display. Their classmates, they said, also learned from everyone else’s research, gaining much more from the displays than they would have from classwork alone.

Assistant principal Shlomis Peikes was beaming with pride as she ushered a guest into the display area. “I just can’t get over the fact that the girls did all this themselves,” she said. She and the girls gave credit to Glazer, whom they describe as a constantly challenging teacher. “We’re always ready for everything with him — that’s why we were able to get it all done so quickly,” one of them said.

Glazer brushed aside any credit for what was achieved, saying, “The girls deserve all the credit. It was an amazing accomplishment.”

To provide them with an overview of the period, he will be showing his students a video brings all the different aspects together, but he was clearly pretty confident already that this was mission accomplished.

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