Jenna Lichtenstein of West Windsor, a senior at High School South, is donating her independent study project for the “Adopt a Survivor” program to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. The project chronicles the life of a Holocaust survivor.##M:[more]##
“We were reading the newspaper one day when I looked over my dad’s shoulder and saw an article about a program that Marianne Meyer (director of education outreach for the Second Generation Holocaust Education Fund) was running at Hightstown High School,” Lichtenstein says. The article presented the “Adopt a Survivor Program” featuring students from Hightstown High School working to bring to life the lives of Holocaust survivors from the area.
“The point of the article was to never allow the travesty that was the Holocaust to be forgotten and potentially repeated,” she says. In addition to detailing the survivor’s life, each high school student made a pledge to retell the survivor’s story in the year 2045, the 100th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps.
“The idea of never letting society forget the horror of the Holocaust was interesting to me and something that I wanted to help with,” she says. She contacted Meyer to ask how she could get involved in this project. Meyer was unable to create at chapter at West Windsor High School South but invited Lichtenstein to participate in the project independently. Lichtenstein jumped at the opportunity.
In December, 2004, Meyer introduced Lichtenstein to Judith Sherman, a Holocaust survivor living in Monroe Township. Sherman is the author of “Say The Name: A Survivor’s Tale In Prose And Poetry,” a book about her experiences as 14-year-old Judita Sternova of Kurima, Czechoslovakia, a Jewish girl imprisoned in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp during World War II. When Sherman spoke at Temple Beth Chaim Sisterhood recently, Lichtenstein was introduced to her.
“Sherman grew up in a small town in war torn Poland and lived a childhood that no one would want to endure,” Lichtenstein says. “Mrs. Sherman has retained strong memories of what she went through — and though a strong woman, she had to pause a few times to compose herself when telling of her life memories.”
The four interviews with Sherman were videotaped at the beginning of 2005. During the summer Lichtenstein transcribed the tapes into a written narrative and did additional research on her town in Poland and the concentration camps where Sherman was interred.
She and Sherman were invited to Washington, D.C., with Hightstown High School Adopt a Survivor students and other survivors to visit the Holocaust Museum. This was Jenna’s second trip to the Holocaust Museum. She visited with her family in April, 2004. Visiting the museum with Sherman was a much more emotional experience. “That was a very emotional day — to say the least,” says Lichtenstein, who will be 18 on December 18.
“Knowing that many of the pictures of the horrors would bring back memories for her was very emotional for both of us,” she says. “Her husband told me that for many, many years Judith could not talk about her childhood, as it was too painful to recollect. However,as she got older she felt the need for others to hear her story and be educated by it.”
The Lichtenstein family moved to West Windsor in 1990 when Jenna was 2 1/2. She attended Maurice Hawk School, Upper Elementary School, Grover Middle School, and High School South.
Lichtenstein’s mother, Fran, is a bookkeeper, and her father David, chief financial officer of an investment advisory firm. Her sister Alison (Ali), 16, is a sophomore at High School South; and brother Matthew, 10, is a fourth grader at Village School.
“Our family was also affected by the Holocaust,” says David Lichtenstein. “My grandmother’s brother, Hersh Smolar, was a leader of the Jewish Resistance in the only city in the Soviet Union in which occupying Nazi forces created a Jewish Ghetto — the Minsk Ghetto. He was a partisan commander during the war and was lucky to have escaped to Israel, where he lived out a long life.” Smolar is author of “The Minsk Ghetto,” a book distributed by the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“Many of our relatives were not as lucky,” he says. “I lost many of my Polish and Russian relatives to the death camps — our only memory was told to me by my grandparents, who left Europe before the War.”
“Our family have become very close with Sherman and her husband Robert,” says Fran Lichtenstein. “They have come over to our house a few times and we E-mail often. Judith and Jenna have several speaking engagements at area schools and they are negotiating to be be interviewed by a television show.”
At South Lichtenstein has earned varsity letters in volleyball and softball, and participated in a travel volleyball league during her sophomore and junior years. Lichtenstein has taken on the task of creating an afterschool program at Grover Middle School in the spring semester to teach middle school girls about the sport of volleyball, which is not a competitive sport until high school. Her goal is to transfer her love for volleyball to middle school girls and to strengthen the South teams of the future.
Lichtenstein also participated in the HELP club and REBEL and volunteered to help Cathy Griffin’s first grade class at Maurice Hawk School. She has completed her college application process and is now waiting for replies from the schools. She is hoping to enter the field of business, with a concentration in marketing or international business affairs.
“I feel very honored that Judith has entrusted with me the retelling of her life during the War years,” says Lichtenstein. “It is a trust that I take very seriously, as there will be no survivors alive to remind people of the horrors they saw and endured. The title of my project is ‘Never Forget’ and that is what I intend to do — to make sure that no one ever forgets what happened so that such a holocaust is never repeated in our history. Though I will be 57 years old in the year 2045, I know that the memory of Judith will remain inside of me.”
