Here’s how the press works these days: A Jewish kid with a blog notes that a New Jersey Jewish federation is holding an educational workshop, conducted by NJ architect Stephen Schwartz, that will encourage children to construct a scale model of the Warsaw ghetto out of Lego building blocks. The blogger writes that the event is “senseless and tasteless.” The Forward, the Jewish weekly newspaper, decides to write a story based on the blogger’s opinion about the Lego workshop. Ha’aretz, the Israeli daily newspaper, sees the Forward story and decides to reprint it, under the headline, “Lego ghettos for kids create sparks.” Finally, a reporter for Rzeczpospolita, a daily newspaper in Poland, calls New Jersey Jewish News and asks for its opinion on the workshops.

Here, in part, is what we told him: Mr. Schwartz’s project is a respectful attempt to have children understand, on their terms, a dreadful period in Jewish history. The children do not “play” with the Legos, but seriously try to recreate a notorious Jewish historical site in order to better understand what happened there.

We also included a copy of an article that ran in the May 18, 2006, issue of NJJN, describing one of Mr. Schwartz’s workshops at the Y in Union. We noted how members of Café Europa, the social organization for Holocaust survivors, took part in the workshop along with 190 students from the Jewish Educational Center of Elizabeth. As the students began to understand the concept of a ghetto, the survivors described their own experiences in camps and ghettos very much like the one they were constructing. Said a social worker taking part: “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 hardly sounds “senseless or tasteless” to us, nor to Menachem Rosensaft, the founding chair of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, who defends the Lego project on the next page of this issue. Mr. Schwartz has created a tactile, powerful way to teach children about Jewish history. He deserved better than international scorn from those who never witnessed a workshop of his in action.