News

Local nonprofit helps bring awareness to Holocaust through annual essay contest

Days of Remembrance is a local nonprofit organization that helps bring awareness to the Holocaust, especially to young people.

Today marks Holocaust Memorial Day, commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp.

As part of its mission, Days of Remembrance holds an essay writing competition open to area students to "foster a perpetual remembrance of the Holocaust."

"We are a board of eight people," said David Jacobson, of Lewisburg, treasurer of the local group. "David Young and I found the group. The whole thing started with him."

Young, who Jacobson called the leader of the group, is retiring from the organization.

"He has just been an inspiration," he said.

Young, he noted, was an ardent promoter of the annual student essay contest.

The contest, open to middle and high school students in a nine-county region, is now in its fifth year.

“We try to promote it as much as we can," Jacobson said. "This year we expanded it to Clinton, Sullivan and Tioga counties."

Students write essays based on two video testimonies of survivors from the U.S. Holocaust Museum found at https://www.ushmm.org/remember/holocaust-reflections-testimonies/eyewitness-to-history.

The due date for the essays is March 11.

The two students selected as first-place winners receive $500. Additional monetary awards are given to second place, third place, and honorable mention winners.

Jacobson noted that the Holocaust, which involved the murder of six million Jews, is a lesson in history about all minorities who have been persecuted.

Congress and the state Legislature, he said, passed resolutions to teach about the Holocaust.

"It's especially rewarding to talk to students and see how it has impacted them," he said.

Young said being part of Days of Remembrance has been a rewarding experience.

He traces his awareness of antisemitism to his childhood in Illinois.

As a sixth grader, he was playing war games with other kids in his neighborhood when an adult who'd served in World War II saw him and other children give the Nazi salute.

"He told me to never do that," he recalled.

Young said, as he grew older, he became more aware of injustice in the world.

As a teacher in Japan, he found out that many of his students were clueless about history, including about Nazi concentration camps such as Auschwitz. That prompted him to launch a student essay contest on the Holocaust there.

He said he's been amazed by many of the student essays being turned out by students in the region.

"When I read the essays that some of the kids have given, I realize America's potential is very good," he said. "They are not historically illiterate. They are inquisitive. They think."

And, he said, they show compassion for mankind.

He's proud of some of the teachers whose students have written the essays.

"It would be a sound investment if all schools could take their kids to the Holocaust Museum for a day," he said. "In these challenging difficult times, it's very important that people not be historically illiterate and that they pick their sources very carefully and be willing to step outside their bubble and see what they can learn."

Williamsport attorney Cliff Rieders, a Days of Remembrance board member, recalled the interest shown by Montoursville middle school students in the Holocaust when he gave a presentation to them on the subject.

"The kids were really, really taken by it," he said. "What it taught me is kids really do want to learn, and there is value in having the Holocaust understood."

The organization, he said, has a mission of teaching students about the Holocaust as a "springboard to understand the hatred of all people in the world, so they can have a broad view of how the world operates."

"The Holocaust is an important story to know and understand," he said.

More information on the organization is at daysofremembrance.org.