Fair links generations through history

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A sixth grade social studies fair tied great-grandsons to great-grandparents and united four families related to the same ancestor, at Far Rockaway’s Yeshiva Darchei Torah.

The exhibit that brought four families together featured a 1955 Life Magazine cover photo of a woman dressed for Shabbat in an elaborate white apron lighting Shabbat candles. The woman and her extended family were the focus of an expansive story: Life tracked down a Torah-observant family that had been living in the same location — Scranton, Pennsylvania — for three generations, and reporters and photographers recorded their lives for two months, documenting family events.

When different parents in the same class viewed the exhibit they were startled to find that three families, the Fischers, Finks and Frisches, were all related and the somewhat distant cousins sat together in the same class.

Rabbi Avi Taub, who’s been organizing YDT’s Jewish Heritage Museum for the last five years, noted that when he emailed the parents about this connection, another family, the Gladstones, responded that they, too, are related.

Additionally, Rabbi Taub said, his father was a classmate of one of the Fink relatives and that his father and grandmother visited the Scranton farm and she “reminisced about it till the end of her life. It’s a small world and we just made it that much smaller.”

Artifacts on display at YDT’s campus on Beach 17th Street and Seagirt Boulevard included a dagger taken by Jonathan Rogoff’s great-grandfather from a captured Nazi officer; a gold pocket watch (an engagement gift for Yitzchak Yehuda Platschek’s great-grandmother who buried it before she was taken away to be murdered in a gas chamber — his grandfather dug it up after the war). “That’s the only thing I have (from her),” said great-grandson Yitzchak. “It makes me think of her.”

Grandmother Roberta Bauer of Far Rockaway noted that she saw “the struggle it was to keep Shabbos,” pointing to her grandson’s exhibit of his great grandmother’s advertising booklets for her furniture store. As a widow with young children, the great-grandmother kept her store closed on Shabbat and was an influence on her community causing others to say that if “she could be closed on Shabbos, we could be closed on Shabbos.”

Grandfather Sam Bergman pointed out his mother’s numbered armband that she was forced to wear during her imprisonment at Halbstadt, a subcamp of the Nazi Gross-Rosen concentration camp, where she was transferred after Auschwitz. Yetta (Applebaum) Bergman was liberated on May 8, 1945.

Bergman’s grandson, Pinchas Hirsch, “interviewed her and connects with her. (The project) gets them to connect with the still living. Young children through tangible items can connect to their history and what came before.” Mrs. Bergman, 91, was quoted on the display board that she saved the armband because, “It’s holy for me. I lived through this. It was my life. This happened to me because I committed a crime-the crime of being a Jew.”

Other displays held a lump of coal that a great grandmother keeps it in her china closet to remind her of when they first arrived in the U.S. from Europe and struggled to remain shomer Shabbat in a coal mining community in Pennsylvania. Another display held an American soldier’s tin fork and knife given to a Holocaust survivor in a displaced person’s camp, kept to remind him of the kindness of the American liberators.

About five years ago, Rabbi Yitzchak Goldberg, junior high school principal at YDT, went with Rabbi Taub to the Jewish Heritage Museum in Battery Park for training to teach children the importance of artifacts and to learn how to create a museum. Rabbi Taub teaches ancient civilization, that of Egypt, India and Mesopotamia. The end of year project focuses on artifacts; each student has to bring their own Jewish oriented artifact and conduct interviews of the family member related to the artifact. Every year Rabbi Taub “changes something,” said Rabbi Goldberg and each board represents a different category. This year’s categories related to social, political, intellectual, religious or economic connections. The artifact had to tie to one of those themes.

Taub noted that the students “look forward to it; at the beginning of the year they are already thinking about it.” He said that he teaches “towards this, talking about our own culture, what is culture and how an artifact connects” to the different themes. “Every kid, even the least motivated, is very excited. We did picture day when they brought in their artifacts, set up backgrounds and foregrounds (for the objects), how to hold the camera to minimize glare, worked on computers in the Gruss computer lab (at the school),” and the students entered their reports on a Power Point template. The project is “a culmination of skills; they learned to do observation and infer what the artifact was used for.” They interview great-grandparents or grandparents and have to “learn how to be investigative journalists and connect with family.”

Another part of the overall project connected language arts where each boy, under the direction of Mrs. Chaia Frishman, head of the YDT junior high English Language Arts Department, crafted a poem, based on George Ella Lyon’s “Where I’m From” poem, tying the artifact projects with their own personal history into a poem. The poetry boards bisected the artifact exhibit.