Students at the Jewish Community Day School of Boston, located in Watertown, packed years of facts, artifacts and personal experiences into six small suitcases and a jewelry case to create a traveling Holocaust museum.
The project, called “Unpacking History – A Mobile Holocaust Memorial,” is the creation of the eighth-graders at the JCDS.
Each of the suitcases has a different theme, with one about the rise of Nazis in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, another about roles played in the Holocaust by companies which are still familiar brands, propaganda, stories of Jews living in Germany at the time, photos, and more. Some of the displays have audio and even video components. One piece includes references to the Holocaust in popular movies and television.
The students were inspired during a trip to Washington, D.C., said eighth-grader Liora.
“We went to the Holocaust Museum, and I think that was probably the biggest inspiration for this project, because it helped us learn about all different sides of the Holocaust and not just something that was done in the classroom,” Liora said.
Eighth-grader Orly said the students thought that having physical representations and making it more interactive makes Unpacking History it more interesting for viewers, but they also wanted it to look serious “so that they understand what we’re trying to convey,” she said.
Classmate Amalia added that the project helped the students learn about the Holocaust.
“I think it also makes it more real and relatable for us to really put our all into this project and try our best to convey this message passing along,” she said.
Students at the JCDS learned directly from people who were there, said Liora.
“We were able to hear a couple stories from Holocaust survivors, which definitely helped us share these different suitcases,” she said. “Because it’s way more impactful to hear it from somebody who actually was there. And also because the next generation won’t get that most likely, and it’s very important to share the story so that we can keep on teaching the world what happened.”
Not everyone receives the lessons that are taught to the students at the JCDS, said Josh Mocle, a social studies teacher and student advisor at the JCDS.
Orly shared a statistic that Mocle taught his students: “One out of five people from the age of 18, to 29 believe the Holocaust was a myth.”
Mocle added, “When I shared it with them, it was really, really striking.”
The school got a grant to help with the project from Facing History and Ourselves, a multinational history organization.
Shira Deener, Head of School at JCDS, worked at Facing History as the Director of the Jewish Education Program before returning to the school where she used to teach middle school history.
“The crux of Facing History, and Josh’s teaching, is the Holocaust did not just start at Auschwitz,” said Deener, who added that many people don’t know that it is the name of a concentration camp.
“But that’s not enough to teach them Auschwitz. We have to understand how we got to Auschwitz, what happened in the ’20s, what happened in the ’30s, and that’s what this is all about,” she said. “The choices individual people made along the way, and what appealed to a teenager, both Jewish and not Jewish, and German. And, what is it about the Hitler Youth that inspired people to join?”
Planning for Unpacking History began two years ago, Mocle said, when he pitched the idea of an interactive project about the Holocaust to Facing History.
“We pitched this idea to them over a year ago, and they were just really excited about the concept of students creating things for other teens, because that’s really the intended audience,” Mocle said.
Unpacking History is meant to be a traveling exhibit. Groups have come in to view the exhibit, including some of Watertown’s City Councilors who viewed the exhibit on the day that Watertown News visited. Another group of visitors was students at the German International School of Boston — a sister school of the JCDS. Mocle also took the suitcases to a conference.
“It just so happened that at this conference I was at, there was one of the curators from the MFA (Museum of Fine Arts), the woman who curated the new Judaica wing, and she was just blown away by all of this,” Mocle said.
The school has plans to continue the tradition of Unpacking History.
“This is the first year that we’ve done this. But there is a plan in place where the eighth graders are going to pass it down to the next eighth-grade class, and every eighth-grade class after them will have some form of ownership over these exhibits,” Mocle said. “Becoming docents for them, so that when we have people come visit us, they can explain it, adding to exhibits and upkeep.”
Find out more about the Jewish Community Day School at www.jcdsboston.org, and contact Unpacking History at unpackinghistory@jcdsboston.org