By Pam Morris 

Imagine a room filled with teenagers, sitting rapt with attention, as they listened to an incredible story of courage, perseverance, strength and family. BBYO at the East Valley JCC in Chandler met for their weekly programming, and came away with renewed passion for Judaism.

On Tuesday, Jan. 27, the world commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Facebook and Instagram were filled with posts:

“Never Again.”

“January 27 marks the liberation of Auschwitz.”

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
– Elie Wiesel’s acceptance speech of his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize

The East Valley JCC was filled with those same viewers of the posts but instead of focusing on their screens, their learning was in person and more meaningful than they ever imagined.

Helen (Hana) Weisman was born in Ulm, Germany in a displaced persons camp. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Helen moved to Israel when she was nine months old. She later came to America at 13. Helen comes from a family of artists and has a natural ability. She has been painting for most of her life and her well-known oil paintings are directly linked to her strong Jewish heritage. Her art is hung in various museums, including the Illinois Holocaust Museum. Helen’s work has been called “free, vivid and imaginative” and magically places feelings and fantasy on canvas for all to appreciate.

At the BBYO program, Helen began the evening by lighting a yahrtzeit candle for the 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. This set the tone for the evening.

Helen spoke to this group of teens about her family’s history. She began by setting the stage: “My mother, and her family lived in the town of Lutsk located in Ukraine, on the border of Russia and Poland. Lutsk was a city where the Jewish spirit filled the air, and Yiddish ‘the language of European Jews’ was spoken everywhere,” Helen shared. “The Sabbath, and the High Holidays, would be felt in the home and in the streets. On Friday, the smells of pot roast, freshly baked challah, home-baked bread, filled the air.” 

As I listened to Helen, I watched the faces of the students. They were transported back to Eastern Europe, smelling those same aromas along with the speaker, seeing her family celebrating and being proudly Jewish.

Then the talk shifted gears, regaling the audience with the harsh reality of Poland, Russia and the neighboring countries during this time. Helen talked about regrets. Her mother was sent by her parents to check on her married sisters in 1941, while the Nazis invaded from the West and the Russians from the East. “I want to go with you,” says Helen’s uncle. Fearing that it was too dangerous, she said no and “that was a regret that my mother was haunted by, every day of her life, because while my mother was away the Nazis marched into her hometown of Lutsk,” said Helen.

Helen’s parents were not sent to concentration camps. Rather, her mom ran and hid wherever she could while her father, having been taken to the Gulag (in Russia), escaped and also did what he could to hide. Eventually, the two of them met in Tashkent in Uzbekistan. Her mom weighed about 80 pounds when they were reunited and he nursed her back to health.

Helen is first and foremost an artist. Many of her paintings are haunting depictions of the atrocities seen all over Europe during the Holocaust: the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jews begging on the streets, being lined up by deep pits to be shot and buried in mass graves.

“What do you see that is similar in these paintings?” Helen asks the BBYO students.

“The Jewish Star,” one notices. “That’s right,” says Helen. “The common thread of these atrocities are that all of these people were taken, tortured, beaten and killed because they were Jewish.”

Another student noticed their eyes. “All of their eyes have a haunted look,” explains Helen. “Whether they were being transported in cattle cars or standing for selection in Auschwitz, there was disbelief, horror, and incomprehensibility.” “How could anyone do this?”

The evening wrapped up with a Q&A. “What is one thing you think that we can do now in the face of Anti-Semitism” asks one student.

“Teach” says Helen. “We must educate the people who didn’t come tonight about what happened, what can happen and about who we are. Education fights ignorance, which helps to eliminate fear.”

Upcoming BBYO programs include a Tu B’Shevat celebration, Galentine’s and Karaoke. To learn more, contact Taylor Divello, tdivello@bbyo.org. Pam Morris is the director of the Early Learning Center at the EVJCC.