Imagine a cold, snowy Sunday morning and it’s a school vacation break too. Seventeen students meet and board a yellow school bus and head out to Newark airport, destination: Chattanooga and ultimately Whitwell, Tennessee,  a small Appalachian town, one hour west of Chattanooga. These students chose to spend two days visiting with the teachers, the principal and the students who are involved in the “Paper Clips” project.

“Paper Clips” is the film that documents the phenomenal story of an educational initiative that evolved into something greater than expected. This movie tells a unique story about the Holocaust with a profound message for students. It shows how a school principal in a small town in the Great Smokey Mountains, was able to motivate youngsters to study genocide and to understand the meaning of eleven million destroyed lives – one person at a time.

Our small contingent went to Whitwell with two goals in mind.  We wanted to meet with these phenomenal youngsters and to thank them for the enormous efforts they employed in conceiving and implementing a project that has affected thousands and potentially can work to curb prejudice, bias and discrimination world-wide. While that does sound rather grand, after visiting with the kids in Whitwell, and seeing firsthand what these seventh and eight graders did, it seems that nothing is beyond our reach, if we will it to be.

We also wanted to share our personal connection to the Holocaust. While the Whitwell students were studying victims and having trouble imagining the individuals who were murdered, we see the faces of our own grandparents, great aunts, uncles and cousins.

When we entered the memorial that houses the millions of paper clips, which is an actual cattle car that transported Jews to the death camps, Micole Horowitz captured the moment best when she said afterwards, “While walking inside the cattle car, hand in hand with my new friend, Ashley, I started to get chills. I imagined my Zayde, such a sensitive man, and my Bubbe, a bubbly woman, being pushed without food into this car. These paper clips weren’t just inanimate objects anymore, they were my Bubbe’s sister Malka, whom my Mom is named after, they were my Zayde’s mother, Mindel, whom I am named for and they were my Savta’s brother Avraham for whom my Dad is named”.

There’s much more to tell about this amazing experience and we plan to do so on May 4th at our Yom Ha-Shoah program. To get a glimpse of the trip, click here.