HALB ‘Names Not Numbers’

HALB eighth graders presented the culmination of their year long “Names Not Numbers” project. This is a unique Holocaust oral history documentary project in which the students themselves collect oral histories of survivors and create a film based on this experience.

As part of the project, there are sessions related to Shoah education, interviewing techniques, and videography. The culminating event is a dinner in which the students’ film is shown; it is then archived in Yad Vashem and the National Library of Israel.

The eighth grade girls shown in this picture are standing with Jack Rybsztajn, a 93-year-old survivor who lives across the street from HALB’s new Woodmere campus and whose story was recounted in a series of articles in The Jewish Star.

Rybsztajn, along with the other survivors who were interviewed, may have been treated by the Nazis as mere numbers. But through the efforts of HALB’s eighth graders, under the leadership of Marjorie Wein and Morah Eliana, their humanity will live on into the future. 

Update: The spelling of Jack Rybsztajn's name was corrected.