Earlier this year, three classrooms at Hillel Academy were transformed into an exhibition about the Holocaust. The project was conceived by 7th-grade teacher Sara Halpern and executed by the middle school students of the school’s girls’ division.
Neither Halpern nor her students imagined the kind of response it would generate.
Community members were raving about it and urging one another to visit in the short three-day period the exhibit was open to the public.
Halpern’s idea dated back to the immediate pre-Covid days and to a name that hasn’t been heard in Denver for some time: former Hillel Academy student Lainy (Lauer) Weinstein. She shared with Halpern, who happens to be Weinstein’s niece, a winning project she had done with her own students in Far Rockaway, NY.
Another Denver name: The late Mendel Shapiro. Weinstein’s class created a portrait of Shapiro, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during the Holocaust, out of jelly beans, in homage to Shapiro’s role as candyman at Zera Abraham when Weinstein was a child.
It wasn’t only the project that inspired Halpern, but the message that she aimed to imbue in “Ember,” her name for the Hillel Academy exhibition five years after Weinstein’s.
“Despite everything that [Shapiro] went through, including losing his two children, he still gave out candy and he still loved children,” says Halpern, reflecting on the exhibition.
When Halpern saw the jelly bean portrait, she wanted to do something like that in her class. She was in the early stages of discussing it with Mordechai Hoffman, the school’s executive director and with Jay and Joyce Moskowitz, advocates for Holocaust remembrance.
Joyce Moskowitz was Shapiro’s niece.
When Covid hit the idea was shelved, but it was reinvigorated last summer, in part by Lola Zussman, known for her work with Keshet of the Rockies, and by Halpern’s alma mater, Bais Yaakov of Baltimore. That school was starting to promote its every-fifth-year special exhibition and inspiration struck Halpern:
Turn the middle school classrooms into an exhibit and tie it in with a Holocaust curriculum she had been planning on teaching.
By this time Joyce Moskowitz had passed away unexpectedly, but one of her children, Dr. Shevie Kassai, got involved, helping to create and fund a budget for the project.
To prepare for the exhibit, Halpern, who says history is her “favorite subject to teach,” taught a unit on the Holocaust to each of the middle school grades. While some students had previous knowledge of the Holocaust through their families, many had no foundation in Holocaust knowledge, “a generational thing that’s inevitable,” Halpern says.
Halpern has completed two teacher trainings in the Holocaust and was cognizant of the differences in emotional maturity that exist among younger and older middle school students, always aiming for an age-appropriate approach depending the specific class.
What that meant for Halpern included avoiding graphic material and deep dives into the mechanisms of the Holocaust, such as cattle cars, gas chambers and crematoria, especially for the sixth-grade students.
A difference she noticed among the grades came from the students themselves. Younger students, she said, would ask, “Why didn’t someone just kill Hitler?”
Halpern would explain that the dynamics were very different from life in the US. She talked about what it means to live under a dictatorship.
“I kept telling them, ‘Girls, you’re talking like an American. You don’t know what it means to have to hide your Yiddishkeit. Your life could be on the line for not agreeing with the government.’”
In the two older classes, students were drawing connections for themselves, trying to better understand how events they had learned about fit into the larger timeline of the Holocaust.
For example, students with Russian and Bukharan (Central Asian) heritage added their perspectives to a history that other students were not directly connected to.
While age-appropriate was a major consideration, so was the concept of “Kiddush Hachaim,” which Halpern translates as “sanctity of life.”
“I wanted the girls to have that perspective that we don’t show the bodies all stacked on the side,” she says. “Our value is what they did with their lives and every minute of breathing life that they had while they were here.”
Instead of “never again,” she focused on how, even during the Holocaust, some Jews found a way to perform mitzvahs, such as tefilin, Chanukah candles or shofar. “And without judgment on anyone who did abandon their faith because of their pain,” she says.
Halpern acknowledges that some might say the exhibit was limited, since most Jews who lived through the Holocaust were not Orthodox, but “I want the students to be able to see that even in the darkest of times there are people who remain steadfast . . . that they can still hold on.
“There’s no reason to feed them the big questions at this age,” she says.
Part of her trainings in Holocaust education was to focus on kiddush, sanctity.
“We don’t glorify death . . . It’s not respectful to those who died to show their bodies, to show the torture,” she says.
“What is respectful is to celebrate how they lived under Nazi rule, trying their best to sanctify every moment.”
Which is why “Ember” gave equal attention to the destruction of European Jewry and to post-Holocaust rebirth.
“When you walked through the exhibit, it was heavy, but it wasn’t morose.”
Ruin. Rescue. Rebirth. Three classrooms, three themes.
After Hillel Academy’s midwinter break, Halpern had completed teaching the unit and the middle school girls hit the ground collecting materials and creating the exhibits. Almost everything was created from recycled materials, she says, an idea she picked up from Bais Yaakov of Baltimore.
“You can take garbage and turn it into art and it doesn’t cost you anything. We used soda bottle tops for lettering and they painted them in gold. All of a sudden you had these gorgeous gold letters from something you throw in the garbage,” she says.
In a hallway with a cattle car on one side and a Kindertransport on the other, broken crayons were used to create the latter, “the symbolism of the Kindertransport kids whose lives were saved, but were also broken, since most of them did not see their families again.
“That concept of a broken crayon, but also because broken crayons aren’t necessarily garbage.”
In a closet between ruin and rescue, the students created “Hidden Yidden,” an exhibit of Jews who hid during the Holocaust.
The furniture in the attic of a non-Jew was all created from cardboard scraps.
Tents that partisans lived in and fake passports that Jews used were also crafted by hand.
“These girls sat for hours and hours and hours,” she says.
Rescue showed some of the ways that Jews escaped the Holocaust, particularly through Shanghai, with photographs of individuals who had taken this route, some of them with descendants in Halpern’s class.
Rebirth showed the growth of the Orthodox Jewish community post-Holocaust through yeshivas and the revival of chasidic groups that were almost completely destroyed by the Nazis.
Israel, as a country that Jews could freely emigrate to, was given prominence as the exhibit emerged into the continuity of the Jewish people post-Holocaust.
Creating the exhibit itself was a learning experience for the students. Some girls who weren’t necessarily paying attention during the learning took to the creativity and the work of building the exhibition, she says.
“For the most part, we had sixth, seventh and eighth graders willing to work with each other,” says Halpern.
“It was incredible to see girls who struggle in school or even the bright girls who were able to take their creativity to the next level.
“There was a lot of pride.”
There were also light bulb moments.
Such as an exhibit on propaganda of the Nazi regime, which contrasted the news of today, as conveyed in the Intermountain Jewish News.
Articles about Holocaust denial in 2025, combined with articles about the postponement of hostage releases, gave the girls a “cyclical perspective,” she says. Issues that faced Jews in the 1930s have echoes today.
The contrast between Jewish media and Der Stürmer allowed the students to see how Jews are portrayed by their enemies versus how Jews feel about themselves.
“It was like light bulbs turning on,” she says. “We’re writing about something that took place 80 to 90 years ago and here is [an article] from this newspaper from my house, from my couch.”
It was incredible to see them grasp the parallels, she says.
Whether such an exhibit will become a regular feature of Halpern’s curriculum remains to be seen. “I don’t think it’s something we can do every year,” Halpern says, but possibly every three years. There are no lack of potential topics. One that excites Halpern is an exploration of the different Jewish communities that have emigrated to the US.
One Hillel student’s mother of Bukharan heritage asked Halpern whether her community could be featured next.
“It would be incredible for all of us to learn more about their community,” says Halpern.
© IJN 2025
