Last week the 20 students in MTA’s senior elective course Names, Not Numbers® got together with members of their family and Holocaust Survivors for the screening of their film: Names, Not Numbers, A Movie in the Making. It is MTA’s 19th year participating in this program, led by program creator, Tova Fish Rosenberg, and coordinated by Mrs. Rivka Djavaheri.
Names, Not Numbers® is a Holocaust oral history film documentary project. Students learn first hand about the Holocaust by making their own professional documentary. Professionals—renowned journalists, documentary filmmakers and guest speakers—instruct the students in interviewing techniques, videography and editing. The students interview, film and edit the Survivors’ testimonies which are then combined into a final documentary.
The event was the culmination of the entire project this year. Students and Survivors were served a catered dinner while listening to speeches from Menahel Rabbi Shimon Schenker, NNN founder Tova Rosenberg and a number of student representatives about the importance of this project and the impact that Names Not Numbers® has had on the life of each student who participated in the project. A lot of emphasis has been placed on the special importance and relevance of Holocaust remembrance as the years following the Holocaust increase, and through their participation in Names, Not Numbers®, these 20 students have become “Witnesses to the Witnesses.”
A particularly special aspect of this year’s project was that five out of six Survivors that MTA was privileged to interview were personal relatives of the students in the project. Yaacov Schilo, the grandfather of one of the boys, survived the war as a baby in hiding with a Catholic family in the Netherlands. His parents, thankfully, survived in hiding with a different family, and they were reunited after the war. Yaacov grew up and still lives in Amsterdam to this day. The boys—including his grandson—interviewed him on Zoom. In the words of his grandson, “It became one of the most honest, emotional conversations we’ve ever had. I didn’t just learn about what happened—I connected with a part of my family’s history in a way I never had before.”
Rena Zekter, from Poland, miraculously survived months in hiding with her mother and three younger brothers. They evaded capture by the local Polish collaborators by hiding in the forests, haystacks, barns and in tall grass through the bitter cold of the winter until liberated by the Russians. Rena is in her 90s, and for her interview the students traveled to her independent living facility in NJ. Her great, great nephew was one of her interviewers, and at the final event he recalled, “This year I feel so blessed to have been able to interview my great great Aunt Regina… despite the nightmares she had just recalled during the interview, she concluded our conversation with “Baruch Hashem.”.. We didn’t just get to study history; we sat with it, cried with it, and learned what strength truly means….”
Michael and Inessa Kogan, grandparents of another of the students, were two child survivors from the Soviet Union. Separately, Inessa survived the war after being evacuated to Siberia with her mother and aunt, and Michael survived after being evacuated to Azerbaijan. Michael lost his father and younger brother and one of Inessa’s sisters died prematurely from her war injuries, but they themselves ended up living through the war and growing up in the Soviet Union where they met, married, raised their son and eventually emigrated to America in the 1980s. Their grandson, one of the students in the project, gave his grandparents a bracha at the movie screening, “I love you, BabaInna and DedaMisha, for all that you are and have done for us, and I ask Hashem to give you many more years of life to be a source of inspiration and strength for our family….”
Masza Rosenroth, the great aunt of another of the students, survived the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and labor camps before being liberated with her sister. In the ghetto they had lost both their mother and father to starvation and a younger sister during one of the children’s deportations, but after the war they were reunited with an older brother who had survived the war as well. Now 100 years old, Masza lives in Los Angeles, and her great nephew and a friend took a special trip to fly out to L.A. to interview her.
Manny Korman and his older brother made it onto one of the last Kindertransports out of Poland before WWII began. He spent a year in the English countryside, and then successfully made it to America where their mother was. Their father had been a passenger on the ill-fated St. Louis, and was later incarcerated in the Dutch Concentration Camp Westerbork, but he thankfully survived and was reunited with his family after the war. Manny, in his 90s, was the only one of the six Survivors who were able to join for this movie screening final event, and the students are so grateful to him that he made the effort to attend.
Just one week later, the six seniors enrolled in the MTA Elective Course “Holocaust Studies” taught by Mrs. Rivka Djavaheri went on a class field trip to the Anne Frank Exhibit at the Center for Jewish History, located in the YU Museum. This trip was the culmination of a year of in depth learning about the Holocaust, exploring such diverse topics as Holocaust Memorials, the Psychology of the Perpetrators, Holocaust Films, Other Victims, the Reparations Controversy, Second Generation struggles, Gilgul Neshamos of the Holocaust, The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and other Resistance, and many many more topics and themes. The students appreciated the unique opportunity to see relics from Anne Frank’s life and the recreated layout of the Secret Annex. It was a fitting end to a meaningful and transformative year of learning together.
