[ot-caption title=”Pine Crest was honored to have twenty Holocaust survivors attend the symposium to share their stories of strength and perseverance with the Freshman Class. (via Zachary Berman, sophomore)” url=”https://pcpawprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Holocaust-Pic-2.png”]

A perfectly qualified young woman applied for a position on a student judicial board at a prominent university. The council questioned the student’s ability to be impartial because of her Jewish heritage. With four members voting against her, the nomination was rejected; the decision changed only after a faculty advisor urged for reconsideration.  This did not take place in Germany in the 1940s; this occurred at UCLA on February 10th, 2015. Anti-semitism is very much alive. This shocking event puts into perspective the importance of the annual Pine Crest Holocaust Symposium for the Freshman Class which was held on March 5^th and 6^th.

The program commenced on Thursday with the viewing of the seven-time Academy Award winning movie, Schindler’s List. This film is considered by many critics to be one of the most accurate depictions of the nightmare that was the Holocaust. The next morning, Mr. Snyder’s first period class welcomed twenty Holocaust survivors to Pine Crest with an extraordinarily special breakfast. Each student was paired with a Holocaust survivor for a 45-minute one-on-one session, followed by a group discussion. Freshman Tara Shecter described the morning, saying, “Each unique, heart wrenching story combined to provide me with an understanding of the Holocaust that has changed the way I think about human history.”

The Symposium continued in Huizenga Gymnasium with round-table discussions with the survivors. Freshman Andie Weinberg was particularly touched by one survivor’s insightful words, she commented, “I learned from a survivor that hate shouldn’t even be a word in the dictionary; there is no reason for hate to exist. He said ‘you don’t have to like me but why do you have to hate me?'” The students were overwhelmed with emotion when one man presented the striped uniform that he was forced to wear while imprisoned at a concentration camp. Freshmen were able to share their individual feelings with their classmates and receive feedback that could only be provided by people who experienced and survived the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Afterwards, the students went to the ICI to attend a presentation by a professor from Nova Southeastern University who is an expert regarding genocides. He emphasized that the only possible way to prevent future catastrophes is to understand the factors that caused these catastrophes in the first place.

Genocide did not end with the Holocaust, as shown by the tragedies in Cambodia, Kosovo, and Rwanda. Indeed, more recent world events have shown why the annual Symposium is an essential component of the Pine Crest curriculum. The murders in Paris at the Jewish market, Iran’s continued commitment to the annihilation of Israel, and the less publicized but equally important daily acts of anti-Semitism, like that which occurred at UCLA, prove that education and action is desperately needed to prevent future genocide.