By Carl Zebrowski
Editor

The seventh-grade students at East Hills Middle School in Bethlehem were disappointed. Not only had they not been sent home because of the snowstorm, but the road conditions forced their special guest scheduled to visit them that day to cancel. 

David Tuck lived an hour away, around Philadelphia, and traveling that distance through the wintry mess would be iffy at best. So his decision made sense. 

But the kids had been very much looking forward to seeing him again. “He survived the Holocaust,” one student said. “He can survive a snowstorm.”

The seventh graders had talked with Tuck on multiple occasions about his Holocaust experience and how important it is to combat antisemitism. Survivor and students developed a strong bond with mutual trust, respect, and affection. 

These youths were part a Holocaust education program set up and run at their school by their teachers Mona Koury-Elias and Victoria Bartkus from 2014 to 2021. As things happen, the program was scaled down and folded into a larger one after that, but those eight years made a strong, positive impression on all involved.

Bartkus brought the idea for the program from her previous school in Allentown. The plan the two teachers developed for East Hills called for two class periods each day for 45 days. The intensive, multidisciplinary program included reading, writing, and presenting. There was plenty of opportunity for the kids to come away with a body of important information, personal stories, and probing thoughts that would stick with them a long time.

The program was developed to be as interesting as possible to engage the kids, hands-on too, and with individuals working together as teams. “We created little museum-like classrooms,” Koury-Elias explained. Small presentations were created for students and others to view and explore. Holocaust survivors like Tuck visited to talk about their personal experiences in Nazi Europe. “We did so many things with the kids—projects, trips…,” said Koury-Elias.

Bartkus recalled a trip that one of her Holocaust education groups in Allentown took to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. At one exhibit there, visitors were allowed to touch a bunk from a concentration camp. 

One of the kids in her group had had a troubled childhood. He’d been arrested before and was often disruptive in class. This 13-year-old boy with the tough façade walked over to the display, Bartkus said. “He touched a bed and burst into tears.” 

“It’s got to be different,” she recalled him saying through sobs as classmates gathered around to comfort him. “It can’t be like this anymore.” Bartkus needed no further proof that Holocaust education programs for kids made a real impact.

Over the years of the East Hills program, Koury-Elias and Bartkus accumulated an assortment of books they used to help tell the Holocaust story to their kids. There were picture books, novels, and more. “I didn’t even know there were Holocaust picture books,” said Koury-Elias.

When the program ended, she hung onto the collection for a while, not ready to give up these resources that had made such an impression on her students. Then the time came when she felt ready to pass them on to someone who could use them as she and Bartkus had.

One day earlier this year, she happened to be searching for a lawyer to work on some documents and stumbled onto the name Daniel Cohen, an attorney with Hof and Reid in Easton. A little research quickly turned up information on his long-time leadership and volunteer roles in the Lehigh Valley Jewish community.

Koury-Elias contacted Cohen about the books, and he knew just what to do: donate them to the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley’s Holocaust Resource Center. She dropped off the books, and Danny got them to their destination. 

She wrote a note to Cohen, giving him a little background on the East Hills program and thanking him for his help. “I can’t tell you how much I miss doing the unit my colleague and I developed,” she told him. “I am glad to know the books will be going to a good place.”

Cohen responded with a thank-you of his own, for the books and more. “I also want to state that you are to be thanked for the fact that you have taught several generations of the importance of the memory of the Holocaust in order to never have it happen again,” he wrote. “Yours is a lasting gift to the Jewish community and our story.”

Today, those gifted books are part of the Holocaust Resource Center, through which our community members continue to make, under the leadership of Shari Spark, visits to public schools with presentations and exhibits on Holocaust education. The Jewish Day School holds the book collection, waiting to be viewed, read, and shared by kids and others in the brand-new Eva and Larry Levitt Jewish Learning and Cultural Center.

The JDS will officially open the Levitt Center with a ribbon-cutting celebration on September 12 at 10 a.m. If you’d like to attend, visit jdslv.org/ribbon or call Beth Kushnick at 610-437-0721 by September 8 to register. 

To help keep the Levitt Center operating into the future, contact Aaron Gorodzinsky at the Jewish Federation at [email protected] or 610-804-5801 to contribute to the endowment fund that Larry Levitt has established.