Above at left: Rev. Thomas Lynch, Pastor St. James in Stratford, Mr. Joseph Zola, Holocaust Survivor with Mrs. Deborah Rusatsky at the May 5, 2008 Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford award ceremonies. In the next picture Mrs Rusatsky is preparing to give her acceptance address printed below and in the next she is being presented her prize, the Jospeh Zola Holocaust Educator Award, and lastly, Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Keynote speaker.

According to Dr. Avinoam Patt, of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judiac Studies, "The Selection Committee was deeply impressed by the fullness of the program you conceived, "The Anne Frank Project" and the opportunity to affect many st udents at St. James School."

Award Acceptance - May 5, 2008

My name is Debbie Rusatsky and I am honored to represent St. James School of Stratford, CT as this year’s recipient of the Joseph Zola Holocaust Educator Award. The Holocaust Project I developed is affectionately called The Anne Frank Project. As an educator in a Catholic School, I am keenly aware of my dual responsibility of academic educator and spiritual mentor. It is an honor and great responsibility to help provide a faith based education to my students, several of whom are here today. When this Holocaust project was conceived about 8 years ago, I felt challenged to incorporate a clear insight into the atrocity of the Holocaust as well as a great spiritual challenge to my seventh grade students.

One of the most profound challenges was how to convey the sadistic slaughter of millions of innocents to students their age. How to convey the stripping of all human rights, heinous physical and mental abuse, alienation, torture and eventual murder of millions. How to convey the planning and mechanization of human slaughter? How a nation of millions could be indoctrinated and become willing participants in the humiliation, torture and murder of a helpless minority? How to convey that this mass murder took the form of the most vile and heinous acts that man can perpetrate? How do you tell children that a nation encouraged and automated the betrayal of its own citizens and used their bodies as "fodder for an unquenchable fire?" How do you tell children this when an adult mind can barely comprehend it?

My second challenge was to teach the spiritual truth of "love your neighbor as yourself." The entire challenge of The Anne Frank Project is to allow my students to contemplate God’s greatest gift to them and to us. God allows us to participate in the completion of His creation. God allows us to participate in the completion of His creation. How? God gave us two great gifts which clearly manifest His love for us. Those two gifts are an "intellect" and a "free will."

Our intellect allows us to understand right from wrong, love from hatred, humility from pride, compassion from neglect. It allows us to understand that only love is creative, hate is never. So, I set upon the challenge of "teaching about hate and steering them towards love." I decided to let someone my students own age do the teaching. Anne Frank eloquently wrote about fear and want and oppression. But, unbeknown to her murderers she repeatedly wrote about her Jewish Faith, her spirituality and her Hope in God. And in the end, a child’s whisper has outlasted the shouts of the murderers. Truth, light and God prevail.

The Holocaust was an organized mechanized attempt by a highly intellectual and free-willed people to annihilate our "elders in the Faith." Many, but not all, chose to "complete their creation" by choosing murder. But others, including the Righteous Among the Nations, chose to "complete their creation" by choosing to love their neighbor as themselves, they chose love. The rescuers of the eight in hiding were perfect examples of this.

One of the requirements of the application process for this award is an “abstract" on the purpose of your Holocaust unit. I wrote "the abstract of the Anne Frank Project is not an abstract at all. I am teaching my children that "you cannot kill."

The Anne Frank Project is forty pages long, requires reading the entire diary, spans six weeks and 120 serious questions. In the end... they are asked to respond to one simple question. "What did Anne Marie Frank say to you?" Quite a few of my students, such as the ones here today, achieve a perfect score on the Anne Frank Project, but, as a Holocaust Educator in a Catholic School, that is not my main goal. My goal as a Holocaust Educator is to help guide their intellect to understand "right", "humility ", "compassion", "love” and to use their own free will to choose to complete their own creation by choosing love.

Elie Wiesel has said "My mission has not changed because I don’t think the world has changed. In the beginning, I thought maybe my witness will be received and things will change. But they don' t. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had Rwanda, and Darfur and Cambodia and Bosnia. Human nature cannot be changed in one generation." Pope Benedict during his recent New York visit said "My own years as a teenager were marred by a sinister regime that thought it had all the answers; its influence grew - infiltrating schools and civic bodies, as well as politics and even religion - before it was fully recognized for the monster it was." It banished God and thus became impervious to anything true and good.

Shalom

Peace

RETURN TO HOME PAGE