New Jersey Jewish News
MetroWest Feature Story

Oprah Winfrey honors New Providence teen’s Holocaust essay

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

It was an essay on the book Night, Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel’s memoir of horror and survival in the concentration camps at Auschwitz.

The work of the New Providence High School junior proved to be one of 50 winning entries in a writing contest for teenagers sponsored by talk show host Oprah Winfrey. As a prize, Jessica and a local Holocaust survivor she “adopted” will fly to Chicago in April to join the other award winners on air with Winfrey and Wiesel. The air date has yet to be announced.

The whole experience is “shocking,” said Jessica, whose family belongs to Temple Sinai in Summit. “I forget about it once in a while, and then it comes back to me and — ‘Wow!’ I have no idea what to expect. It is going to be so exciting.”

Night is the current selection of Oprah’s Book Club — a segment of her popular afternoon talk show — which has catapulted it onto The New York Times best-seller list 45 years after its publication in 1960.

The book is often assigned reading in many Holocaust education courses, and according to Winfrey’s Web site, it should be “mandatory reading for every human being on the planet.”

Answering Winfrey’s essay question — “Why is Elie Wiesel’s book Night relevant today?” — was not a difficult task for Jessica. When she read it as a freshman three years ago, it spawned an interest in Holocaust studies that impelled her to take part in the Holocaust Council of MetroWest Adopt-a-Survivor program.

The program was conceived by Irving Roth, who wanted to ensure that his stories and other survivors’ stories would endure for at least a century.

“Roth didn’t want students to see Jews, survivors, as a pile of skeletons or a pile of shoes or as a group of people in uniform behind barbed wire,” said council director Barbara Wind. “He wanted them to be seen as human beings and to make a connection with what they are now. He wanted them to be these people’s witnesses 100 years after the Holocaust, to be there to speak on that survivor’s behalf in 2045.”

Nearly a year ago, Jessica “adopted” survivor Hedy Brasch, 75. Wind said the link between the student and the survivor was a “random adoption,” made on the basis of proximity between Jessica’s home in New Providence and Brasch’s in Springfield.

To the student, the relationship has “meant everything. After listening to her story, I have a hero now. I have a second grandmother.”

Jessica has videotaped Brasch’s oral history — a chronicle of her arrest at the age of 14, her deportation to and deprivations in Auschwitz, her immigration to New York, and her reunion with her mother after World War II.

Brasch said she, too, is proud of her adoptive relationship and its connections with the past, present, and future.

“Jessie is really a very charming girl,” said Brasch. “To me, if I can be of any service to young people, I am very pleased. Jessie told me she is going to read my story in 2045, and I told her, ‘I won’t be there.’ It bothers me that that there are so many deniers. But I am happy to see how many people are interested in the story.”

Wind is pleased that the match she helped make will receive national prominence and that Jessica’s essay was chosen from some 50,000 entries.

“It is wonderful,” Wind said. “Oprah is so powerful in terms of her book club and her popularity. This will create a lot of interest in the Holocaust. I think it’s quite remarkable that one of our students was one of the chosen. It is very, very rewarding.”

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