New Jersey Jewish News
Central New Jersey Feature
Building blocks link survivors to the young in remembering Warsaw Ghetto
For Regina Lowenbraun it was almost too painful to watch children joyfully plunging into huge buckets of Lego blocks and setting to work to construct a model of the Warsaw Ghetto. Miniaturized on a 17-by-19-foot floor plan in front of her, the walls and unforgettable landmark buildings started to take shape, all in bright colors.
She was 11 years old and all alone when she found herself living among those buildings in the dark reality of World War II.
But she had chosen to come to the Y in Union, and she was glad. “It’s very hard when I see that this is my place,” she said. “But I enjoy seeing the children doing this. I don’t want them to forget.”
Lowenbraun and her husband Henry, who live in Union, were among the members of Café Europa, the social organization for Holocaust survivors, who gathered at the YM-YWHA of Union County on May 11 to watch the Warsaw Ghetto project take shape, organized by architect Steven W. Schwartz. Some 190 students from grades four, five, and six at the Jewish Educational Center Yeshiva of Elizabeth were the builders.
Schwartz, who works with SWA Architects of Livingston, started doing his Lego programs about six years ago at synagogues, community centers, and schools, as a hands-on way for children, their parents, and grandparents to connect with Jewish history. Other projects have included the Old City of Jerusalem, Masada, a giant menora, and other structures of significance in Jewish life and history.
This was the first time, however, that he has brought together the young bricklayers with their elders who have first-hand experience of the site they were to construct.
Jewish Family Service of Central New Jersey social worker Fay Ross and JFS nurse Gloria Brown were keeping a very close eye on the seniors. Ross is the organizer of the Cafe Europa gatherings in conjunction with Susan Silberner at the Y. Some of the survivors “chose not to come,” Ross said. “It was more than they could handle. But for these people who wanted to come, it’s a wonderful experience — to see the young people involved like this. It’s very important for them to see this generation connect with what they went through, to know it will be remembered.”
That is Schwartz’s mission. He and his wife, Bunny, through their Building Blocks Workshops, do around 30 of the programs a year all over the country, and the demand for their services seems to be growing exponentially. “Every time feels like the first,” he said. Recently, he expanded his repertoire to take in non-Jewish sites, having children recreate historical areas in Summit, Montclair, Kearny, and Harrison.
In those, as with the Jewish sites, he makes an enormous enlargement of a map of the area, with the outlines the children will follow. In the course of two hours, separate groups take on individual buildings and follow drawings or photographs, capturing the dominant architectural features.
In the Warsaw Ghetto project, Schwartz had the students build, among other things, the gabled form of the Great Synagogue, the Jewish orphanage, the site at 18 Mila St. where the confined Jews planned their uprising against the Nazis, and the apartment building where a child called Nessa — now Nessa Ben Asher of Short Hills and a frequent participant in these programs — used to live.
“I want you to remember the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto,” he told the children. He pointed out to them that it was just a few days past the May 8 anniversary of the last days of resistance in the ghetto.
Three women who survived that terrible time in other places came forward to tell the children about their
experiences, Clara Kramer of Elizabeth, Sonya Oshman of Hillside, and Sonia Samuels of Union. They wanted to highlight for the children that Jews did not all go passively to their deaths, that there were Jews who fought bravely, like the legendary Bielski Brigade and the other partisans. But the Warsaw fighters were among the bravest. “No other country had an uprising like the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Kramer said.
Schwartz, for all the many times he has guided youngsters through the clamorous chaos of the construction to the astounding final result, had tears in his eyes at the end of Wednesday’s Cafe Europa event. “I’ve met people who davened in that synagogue,” he said. “It’s a tremendous honor to meet someone who survived the crisis of those years.”
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