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Marking the Holocaust - in Mississippi

(Jerusalem Post) Diane A. McNeil - In 2009, teachers Susan Powell and Melissa Swartz at Horn Lake Middle School in Mississippi realized that many of their students had "never heard there was a Holocaust." The teachers opted to encourage personal involvement by collecting 1.5 million pennies - one for each child who perished in the Holocaust. After three years of collecting, the pennies weighed in at more than 4 tons. In March, child survivor Friderica Beck Saharovici told the students at the opening of the Unknown Child Holocaust Memorial/Park in Horn Lake, "I was a first-grader when all the Jewish children were thrown out of the public schools for no other reason than being born Jewish." The centerpiece for the memorial park will be a life-sized sculpture by Canadian-born sculptor Rick Wienecke, now an Israeli citizen. He explained that the child in the piece is leaning against the inside of a crematorium door in a fetal position with his hand (in his mind) reaching through the door in Auschwitz and clutching a small plot of ground, the Land of Israel, the only place where he knows he will be safe. Mississippi native and architect Doug Thornton has designed the memorial/park, which will include towering Star of David walls holding each of the collected pennies. Saharovici concluded, "By preserving the memory of the Holocaust and its moral lessons, we tell the world that such atrocities should never happen again to Jews or to any other people in the world. I don't want my past to become anyone else's future." The writer is president of the Unknown Child Foundation, Inc.
2016-04-28 00:00:00
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