Jewish teens, seeing links to the Holocaust, push Darfur issue

By DOUG CHANDLER

Josh Feldman, a resident of Avon, is taping a documentary about what he sees as the world’s indifference to genocide.

The interviews, conducted with his partner in the project, Sean McNamara, include conversations with Holocaust survivors, a former teacher whose family was affected by the Armenian genocide, and a survivor of the genocide in Darfur, a region of the Sudan.

There’s no surprise in a concerned citizen picking up a camera to highlight a problem that he feels needs exposure. What may be a surprise, though, is that, in this case, the filmmakers are both 17 and making the documentary as part of their senior project at Avon High School.

Nor is Feldman the only high school student in the state or even the area who hopes to raise awareness about the slaughter in Darfur, where some estimates place the number of people killed in the past two years at more than 400,000.

Like many of the students, though, Feldman is Jewish, a fact he believes is connected to his concern over the issue.

“It could have been me if I was born 60 years ago,” said Feldman, who attended Beth El Temple’s religious school in West Hartford and participated in the synagogue’s youth group. “I can’t go back and save them,” he added about the Holocaust’s victims, “but I can help people who are threatened today.”

While Feldman’s family was untouched by the Holocaust, he said, Dror Markus, a 16-year-old resident of West Hartford, counts among his relatives grandparents who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and survived the war by pretending to be Christian.

His personal history is one of the factors that prompted Markus to launch a “Save Darfur” club this year at Hall High School, said the student, whose parents, Etan and Anat Markus, are both natives of Israel.

The club, formed with the help of Sarah Lawrence, a social studies teacher at Hall, plans to host speakers and sell rubber “Save Darfur” bracelets. Its first meeting, attended by about eight students, took place three weeks ago.

“Our main goal is to raise awareness in the school,” said Markus, who’s also president of the Greater Hartford chapter of Young Judaea. Once other students learn about the situation, he added, the club can then focus on moving them to action, which may include raising funds for Sudanese refugees and writing letters to elected officials.

Markus has already written an opinion piece about the situation in Darfur for Hall Highlights, the high school paper, in which he draws parallels between those killings and the Holocaust. The slaughter, he noted, is aimed at non-Arab inhabitants of the region and is being carried out by Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, or “armed men on horses.” While the Sudanese government denies any affiliation with the Janjaweed, the government has done nothing to end the attacks.

The involvement of Lawrence in the club, which the teacher advises, points to one way in which student-led campaigns to end the genocide have begun: through a class or academic project. At Hall High School, for instance, some of the members of the Save Darfur club are enrolled in a course on human rights led by Lawrence. The class, she said, is based on a social-action project in which each student learns about a particular issue and draws up a plan of action.

Feldman, the son of Samuel and Debra Feldman of Avon, was motivated, in part, by a class on “Genocide and Human Behavior,” taught by Stuart Abrams, a social studies teacher. The class looks at four genocides during the past century, said Abrams — the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the mass killings in Cambodia and Rwanda.

Elsewhere in the state, Ariel Polokoff, the 13-year-old daughter of a Reform rabbi, is one of the youngest students involved in efforts to end the killings.

Polokoff, a seventh-grader at Chase Collegiate School in Waterbury, became active after attending a meeting on the issue sponsored by the Connecticut Region of the Anti-Defamation League two years ago, when she was merely 11. She attended the meeting with her father, Rabbi Eric Polokoff, the spiritual leader of B’nai Israel in Southbury and a member of the ADL’s Sudan Task Force.

Moved by what she saw and heard, Polokoff organized a concert at her father’s synagogue last spring at which she gave a power-point presentation on Darfur. She has since “reprised” her presentation at her Bat Mitzvah last month and a recent program sponsored by the Jewish Communities of Western Connecticut, the ADL and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Rabbi Polokoff said.

The presentation includes slides from a number of sources and an interview with a local physician who traveled to Darfur to aid victims.

Discussing his daughter’s involvement, the rabbi said she has an awareness of the Holocaust “and an understanding of why we, of all people, can’t be bystanders.”

That same emotion is what drives Rachel Forbes, 16, a former student at Ezra Academy in Woodbridge and currently a junior at Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven.

Forbes, who plans to participate next spring in the March of the Living, a teen mission to Poland and Israel, hopes to enlist the program’s alumni and 2006 participants in efforts that would include a statement on Darfur and a meeting with U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman, D-CT.

She has already discussed those ideas with Sydney A. Perry, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven, and Lieberman’s Washington-based chief of staff, Clarine Nardi Riddle.

Riddle, recalling her conversations with Forbes, said she encouraged the teen’s involvement and ensured her that “her voice would be heard. … Sometimes,” she continued, “young people feel that, since they’re not able to vote yet, their voices won’t be heard. But that’s not the case.” The senator’s office, like other Congressional offices, responds to anyone who writes, whatever their age.

At 13, Polokoff is apparently learning that same lesson, having raised $1,400 at the concert she organized and having earned the admiration of many adults.

“I know I made a difference, and I made a lot of people aware of what’s happening,” Polokoff said, adding that other children can also make a difference. “You just have to put your mind to it.”

(This article originally appeared in the Connecticut Jewish Ledger.)