Students Both Learn and Teach About the Holocaust

For every million Jews killed in the Holocaust, the sixth-grade class at Rancho Santa Margarita’s Morasha Jewish Day School lighted a yellow candle.

For every million wartime Jewish supporters and Nazi protesters, the sixth-grade class lighted a white candle.

And for European diplomats who made it possible for people to escape the Holocaust, the sixth-graders lighted a blue candle.

To mark Sunday’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Morasha Jewish Day School’s sixth-graders Monday morning told fellow students and parents what the tragedy meant to them.

During the 40-minute ceremony, the 11 students read “Mourners’ Kaddish,” a traditional Jewish prayer for people who have died, and recited the names of the concentration camps where 6 million perished.

Schoolmates and parents learned the names of Hungarians, mostly children who died in concentration camps, to personalize the tragedy, students said.

Then they brought seven yellow tulips to a table at the front of the room and placed them one by one in a vase, thanking the 5 million non-Jews who risked their lives to rescue the persecuted.

“It raises your level of respect for people who have hearts. It makes you realize how important caring is,” Batia Pinsker, 12, said of those who helped Jews escape.

Batia said two of her grandparents are concentration camp survivors. Commemorating those who didn’t survive “means a lot to me,” she said.

Classmate Josh Chazen, 12, said observing Holocaust Remembrance Day taught him “what the Jewish people had to go through and how they fought to be alive.... I have a higher respect for them.”

Holocaust Remembrance Day is on the 27th day of the Hebrew month Nisan, marking the anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising.

Since 1951, Holocaust Remembrance Day has begun at sunset on that day and ended the following evening.

About half of the school’s 100 students gathered in the campus meeting room at 8:30 a.m. for Yom HaShoah, the commemoration of the Holocaust.

Afterward, the sixth-graders presented their speeches and research.

“I was very moved,” said Lili Landman, whose daughter spoke in front of the 50-member audience. “They said it with a lot of feeling. This is part of their heritage.”

Landman said the school’s teachings on the Holocaust, including last school year when a survivor visited the school, helps the students realize the importance of World War II.

“It gave them more of a sense of reality,” she said. “It gave them hope to never give up no matter how bad it is.”