Children collect crayons to learn about Holocaust

The Record (Hackensack N.J.) (MCT) - The Fair Lawn, N.J., Jewish Center is filling its hallways with crayons.

In boxes or jumbled in clear plastic containers, the crayons, for now, are unbroken; their tips still come to a factory-perfect point.

But although they have never been used, these crayons are already serving an important purpose for children at the Jewish Center's Hebrew School, and it belies the bright colors of the crayons. They are helping the children learn about the Holocaust.

For the past year, students at the Hebrew school have been working to collect 1.5 million crayons _ one for each child murdered.

The idea is that the sheer number of crayons _ and the time it takes to collect them _ will help the children understand the significance of a number so large most people have no idea how big it really is.

"Some of them, the younger children, can't even count yet," said Flora Frank, chairwoman of the project. "They don't know what one million even looks like, how many zeros follow the one."

The problem is a common one _ The United States Holocaust Museum even provides tips for teachers trying to help children comprehend the massive number of victims.

Crayons struck Frank as a powerful symbol of children's lives lost, especially once the students see the volume of their finished collection.

"You always think of children with crayons," she said. "Most people can't understand how much 1 million, let alone 1.5 million crayons is. How much space does it take up?"

As the project grows, the students say they are starting to get a better idea of what Frank means.

Samuel Flanzman, 12, said he checks a bulletin board that shows how many crayons the students have collected every time he comes to classes at the Jewish Center. After a year, the students have collected 70,000.

"We've been doing it for so long, and you can see how many thousands there are," he said. "And there's still a lot more left."

His classmates said they are constantly struck by how large the number is. "It's sad," said Rachel Toron, 11. "That's a lot of kids."

The project has been so successful that it is being adopted by public schools across the state, whose students will donate crayons to the Jewish Center as part of their Holocaust education curriculum, Frank said. At the end, the center will display some of the crayons into a permanent Holocaust exhibit. It will donate the rest to schools serving underprivileged populations. The center made an early donation on Tuesday, giving 10,000 crayons to two Paterson, N.J., schools.

Representatives from those schools said they will work the donated crayons into lesson plans on the Holocaust.

"The crayon is something that is a very simple object," said Frank Puglise, principal of Paterson's P.S. 21, who collected some for his school. "In this instance, it's something that has tremendous significance."

Arlyne Berzak, guidance counselor at P.S. 24 in Paterson, said teachers in her school are supplementing the crayon lesson with a film about a school in Tennessee that collected 6 million paper clips, symbolizing the estimated number of Jewish Holocaust victims.

"They're really fascinated by it," she said. "Anything that's tangible makes the history more vivid to them."

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