Students at the Yeshiva of Central Queens marked Yom HaShoah with meaningful ceremonies featuring Holocaust survivors on Tuesday, April 18. Through film, song, stories, and t’filah, students and guests honored the victims of the Holocaust.
Grades 3-4 and Grades 5-8 participated in age-appropriate assemblies to commemorate the important day, and students had the incredible opportunity to hear from Holocaust survivors. Rabbi Mark Landsman, Principal of YCQ, told students how their generation will be the last to hear eyewitness testimony, and they must not take this for granted.
Students and their guests shared the heartbreaking stories of their family members who were murdered and the miraculous accounts of those who survived. The Junior High School boys’ choir, led by Rabbi Mordechai Rovner, sang two beautiful songs of “Acheinu” and “Ani Maamin,” and six candles were lit to symbolize the six million Jewish victims. The grandfather of Binyamin Flamenbaum, a survivor and a chazan from Hungary, led a touching rendition of the special “Keil Malei Rachamim” t’filah.
Later that evening, the Names, Not Numbers© documentary that Grade Eight students have been creating for months, was screened at a special event at YCQ. Every year at YCQ, eighth grade students participate in the Names, Not Numbers program, an intergenerational oral history film project created by Mrs. Tova Fish-Rosenberg.
For this year’s film, students interviewed five survivors: Ruth Mermelstein, Marion Lazan, Tanya Bernstein, Rabbi Moshe Yoel Walkin, and Miriam Mandelbaum. Students recorded the harrowing accounts of their survival in ghettos, forests, and concentration camps.
This project teaches students both interviewing skills and filming techniques as they work with a Holocaust educator, social studies teacher, newspaper journalist, and filmmaker. The students learned the history prior to the War, during the Shoah, and at liberation through Web-based research and interviewing skills. Each student made this commitment to take an active role inspiring survivors to tell their stories to create a documentary film.
The Yeshiva of Central Queens gratefully acknowledges the Names, Not Numbers© Program that has taught students about the Holocaust through the accounts of eyewitnesses and has enabled meaningful relationships to be forged between the survivors and our students. YCQ has benefited tremendously from its participation in this Legacy Heritage project. Mrs. Heather Finkel, the Faculty Advisor for the program, also deserves tremendous recognition for hard work, as does Ms. Elisheva Simanowitz, the Program Organizer of the event.
