A group of high school students, including teens from the MetroWest area, at the entrance to the Majdanek concentration camp during the 2007 March of the Living.
Photos by Joel Katz
November 13, 2008
With one eye trained on the future and the other on grim history, The Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life is seeking funds for scholarship aid that will enable MetroWest high school students to take part in a March of the Living trip next spring.
The journey will bring the teens to the concentration camps of Poland before visiting Israel on its Independence Day.
“We have embraced the March of the Living because we are about promoting experiential Jewish learning,” said Robert Lichtman, executive director at the Partnership. “This is an unbelievably powerful educational experience. It is not a tourist trip. It is not a vacation.”
“We are trying to stress that kids learn not only in the classroom,” said Partnership president Ellen Goldner. “We feel experiences like camp, like youth groups, are very important. The March of the Living is also one of those life-changing experiences.”
It is also one of the best tools the Partnership has for encouraging teenagers to stay involved in organized Jewish life, Lichtman said.
He cited a study by William Helmreich, a professor of sociology and Jewish studies at CUNY Graduate Center and City College of New York and author of The Enduring Community, a history of the MetroWest Jewish community and its origins.
“Helmreich found that 94 percent of March of the Living alumni will give their children a Jewish education,” Lichtman said. “Ninety-four percent intend to marry a Jewish spouse. Ninety-three percent say it increased their Jewish identity. And 84 percent say it made them more tolerant of others, because they never want to think about minorities and other ethnic groups the way the Jews were thought about by the Nazis. It is an identity-shaping experience.”
Despite its value, the educator said its price can be prohibitive. The 2009 trip, scheduled to run from April 19 to May 1, will cost each participant $5,000.
Lichtman said he hopes to include at least 11 students from MetroWest among the 56 participants from a region that includes New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. “But every year we turn kids away,” he said.
“We don’t want to turn anybody away because of financial constraints,” said Goldner. “But when you think about sending your kids to camp next summer, the march is a heavy hit.”
With that in mind, the Partnership is seeking to provide partial scholarships of $1,000 to help subsidize one-fifth of each trip. “Our intent is to help pay for kids who can’t afford to go otherwise,” said Lichtman on Nov. 7, the morning after a fund-raiser for the program brought in $230,000. “But if we receive enough money, we may be able to cut the price for everyone who wants to go.”
“We are hoping to enshrine this program with an endowment of $500,000,” he said. “Ten years from now, 20 years from now, it will enable us to send 20-25 kids who need financial assistance on the trip.”
Between now and 2010, Lichtman said, he hopes to raise and allocate $50,000, which will be split between recruitment and scholarship funds for the trips in 2009 and 2010. “By 2011 we hope the endowment fund will keep us going,” he said.
A universal lesson
Joel Katz, a Morris Plains resident, is coordinating the fund-raising drive. In the past 12 years he has accompanied 1,100 people on March of the Living trips. Katz’s father, an American soldier in World War II, helped liberate the German concentration camp at Dachau. His mother “lost her entire family in the Holocaust,” Katz said. “I never knew my grandparents.”
Campaign cochairs Jane Wilf and Ron Silbermann at a Nov. 6 fund-raiser for the March of the Living scholarship drive.
“Every Jewish community from every nook and cranny of the world comes on this journey each year,” he said. “But we are one of the few regions that does not have a subsidized scholarship program. It is about time we have one here.”
“Holocaust education is something very personal to me,” said Ron Silbermann of Randolph, who is cochairing the fund-raising drive along with Jane Wilf of Livingston. “Both of my parents are survivors. My dad and his cousins were in Dachau, and my mother and her family were imprisoned in Nuremberg.”
“The trip gives these kids more of an education than if you read it in a book. You are actually in a gas chamber with the door closed. You can feel what these people must have felt. At Majdanek you see a pile of ashes and bones that came out of the ovens. They could have Majdanek up and running again in just 48 hours. The camp is almost perfectly intact.
“I think it is important that today’s youth realize it is not just ancient history. It is a universal lesson,” said Silbermann.
Partnership managing director Linda Jum, who coordinated the 2007 regional contingent and accompanied the March, said, “For me to be with the teens, walking in the footsteps and hearing the survivors’ stories, was an extremely transformative experience.”
“Holocaust survivors are precious to us, but they are dying out, and one day there won’t be any left,” Lichtman said. “We need to anticipate that day and prepare others who can tell the same story. We need to prepare kids who go to college and come in contact with Holocaust deniers. They can say, ‘What do you mean the Holocaust didn’t happen? I was in Auschwitz. I met a survivor.’
“But that is not enough. It is not enough to deny the deniers. We want kids to affirm Jewish life. That is what our goal is.”
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