Simple bench helps teach Mother of Sorrows students about Holocaust
Teaching sixth-graders about the Holocaust is not an easy task.
“At the sixth-grade level, you have to be very careful in what you expose kids to,” said Patty Weisser of Murrysville, a teacher at Mother of Sorrows School. “My spin on it is to focus on the tolerance we should have for one another and the perseverance and courage of the survivors.”
In preparation to read Lois Lowry’s novel “Number the Stars,” students learned some background about the treatment of European Jews during the Holocaust.
When the discussion turned to how students could create a tribute to those who suffered, Weisser had an idea.
“There was this old bench I had at my house,” she said. “In another book (set in Nazi Germany), ‘Friedrich,’ I read that Jews could only sit on yellow benches.”
Weisser was doubly inspired during a Classrooms Without Borders trip she took in July to Poland. During the trip, she learned about the Places of Remembrance memorial created by artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock. It is a series of seemingly innocuous signs posted throughout Berlin’s Bavarian Quarter, a former Jewish district in the city.
The signs appear simple and harmless on the front; on the back, however, each bears the language of laws created in Nazi Germany to dehumanize Jews, restricting what goods they could purchase, what groups they could join and even when they were allowed out in public.
Weisser contacted Stih to obtain a copy of the Bavarian Quarter map and the 80 symbols posted throughout its streets. She worked with fellow teacher Laurie German’s project-based art class to paint the bench yellow, and each student chose one of the sign symbols to paint on the bench, as a reminder that each represented a way of robbing German Jews of their freedom and way of life.
Weisser said the late-October mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue only reinforced the need for both the Holocaust unit and the bench project.
“We started working on the unit the night before (the anniversary) of Kristallnacht,” she said. During Kristallnacht — the “Night of Broken Glass” on Nov. 9-10, 1938 — nearly 100 Jews were killed as German paramilitary forces and civilians torched synagogues and vandalized Jewish homes and businesses.
Weisser hopes the bench can serve as an inspiration to others.
“This bench needs to travel places, rather than just stay at the school,” she said.
Weisser plans to reach out to local synagogues and places such as the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh to discuss how the bench can be used as a teaching tool and to spark discussion and said she hopes it made a difference for her students.
“If I can help these kids become more tolerant of other people, that’s the goal,” she said.
Patrick Varine is a TribLive reporter covering Delmont, Export and Murrysville. He is a Western Pennsylvania native and joined the Trib in 2010 after working as a reporter and editor with the former Dover Post Co. in Delaware. He can be reached at pvarine@triblive.com.
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