Throughout the year, AGLA High School students have hosted a series of speakers to enrich student perspectives and inspire them to take action in our community. Before the winter break, Holocaust survivor, Harry Davids and Coordinator of the Righteous Conversations Project, Rachel Fidler were the guest speakers.
The Righteous Conversations Project is a program run by Ms. Fidler at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH). Part of Ms. Fidler's job is to encourage the survivors to share their usually horrific stories that may have been untold for a lifetime due to the pain in re-living the Holocaust years. She pairs teens from the community with the survivors.
The Righteous Conversations Project also holds a four day workshop called"Remember Us" each summer at the Harvard-Westlake School. In 2013, AGLA students Trey Carlisle, Purag Moumdjian, Arine Eisaian, Jake Fernandez, Milo Schureman, Matthew Martinez, Lilia Pankers and Kali Van Dusen participated. The teens met with holocaust survivors and seasoned filmmakers to hear their stories, brainstorm current injustices with similar themes, and then script, direct, act in, and edit Public Service Announcements (PSAs.) These finished PSAs were then "gifted" to non-profits that the students feel would benefit most from their message. The program culminates in a "gifting ceremony."
Mr. Davids partnered with the students for the Remember Usproject. He shared his story with the rest of AGLA during the December speakers series event in a hushed room after Trey Carlisle introduced him.
In 1942, Mr. Davids was "given" as a baby to a family named the Bakkers who were a part of the Dutch Resistance. The Bakker family was secretly packaging and mailing guns and ammunition through their family-run post office and was also very active in hiding Jews in need of cover. They told neighbors the infant was from friends in the big city who sent him their way to get over his illness. They told German soldiers who knocked on their door that he was their own fifth child. With Davids' real parents in an internment camp, they struggled to find distant doctors willing to risk treating a Jewish baby. (Something more difficult for boys to hide, as only the Jewish infants were circumcised back then.)
Once baby Davids had recovered and the war was settling down, an uncle appeared from South Africa to fight for and win guardianship of the child. Mr. Davids' life unfolded in South Africa after that, where he bore witness to the injustices of apartheid. When politics drove him out of the country, he relocated to Southern California. By then, Mr. Davids had had a life of experience that made him appreciate the Edmund Burke quote: "The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing." It was with this story that the AGLA teens who partnered with Mr. Davids decided to target the issue of bullying in their PSA.
Cyber bullying and a holocaust story may not seem an obvious match, but when you consider Mr. Davids' mission to "try to bring more upstanders out of those bystanders," you see that they are definitely of the same vein. As AGLA student, Trey Carlisle, put it: "We can carry the torch...make sure injustices don't happen again." Their PSA, Open the Door, is on the Aveson YouTube channel along with several others.
These guest speakers were brought to AGLA to inspire us to never stop telling our stories. In many regions, history ignores the holocaust in school. A recent Anti-Defamation League report surveyed 53,000 people in over 100 countries, and found that only 54% had heard of the Holocaust. Of those, 32% believe it’s a myth or greatly exaggerated.
Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors alive to personally hand down the facts from that time period. Thanks to programs like The Righteous Conversations Project and museums like the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the next generation of upstanders is hearing, learning, and preserving their stories.
Congratulations and thank you to the AGLA students who have already started leading by example!
Vision means seeing what could be and what will be and living the difference.
To learn more about the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, visit their website at: www.lamoth.org
Click here to view some of the PSA's the students helped create:
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