Warwick Middle School students participate in Holocaust Remembrance Day project
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From left to right, Jess Sander, Grant Parrelli and Harli Weber preparing some of the hundreds of butterflies handmade by Warwick Valley Middle School students and staff for the Holocaust Museum in Houston, Texas. The butterflies will be on display as part of a special exhibition. Photos provided by Maureen Westphal, WVHS Communications Specialist
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Warwick - Warwick Valley Middle School eighth-grader teacher Joan Rueckert has collected several hundred butterflies handmade by Middle School students and staff in remembrance of children of the Holocaust. She will be photographing and documenting all of the butterflies before sending them to the Holocaust Museum in Houston, Texas.
The museum is collecting 1.5 million butterflies in remembrance of the 1.5 million children who perished in the Holocaust. All 1.5 million butterflies will be displayed in a special exhibition, scheduled to open in Spring 2012.
As a school-wide effort, Rueckert enlisted the help of her colleagues on the faculty and all the Middle School students in creating the butterflies.
Rueckert has a special interest in the Holocaust, and in teaching that part of the eighth-grade curriculum to her students in a meaningful way. Having trained in Israel at the leading Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, in 1997, and having studied in Poland, she knew where to look for new areas of inspiration when preparing her lessons. Perusing the United States Holocaust Museum’s Web site, Rueckert came across “The Butterfly Project” and thought it would be a thoughtful and reflective way for Warwick students to learn about their Jewish counterparts from the 1940s.
The handmade butterflies are a tie-in to a poem written by Pavel Friedman, a young victim of the Holocaust, in June 1942. The poem, called “The Butterfly,” describes the last butterfly the author ever saw and explains to the reader that “butterflies don’t live here in the ghetto.”
Asked what they learned from the lesson on the Holocaust and the Butterfly Project, one student said simply: “We learned that a lot of children died in the Holocaust and that the children were very brave.”
Holocaust Remembrance Day falls each year on the 27th of Nissan, known as Yom Hashoah. This year the National Day of Holocaust Remembrance was on April 21.
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