Wristbands included as Holocaust centers teach children about modern-day genocide in Sudan

By SUZAN CLARKE
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: February 2, 2006)

SPRING VALLEY

Before a room filled with middle-school-age children gathered inside the Holocaust Museum and Study Center, Rabbi Michael Gisser approached the blackboard, took up a piece of white chalk, and wrote: “Please help stop the genocide in Darfur.”

Each student painstakingly copied the message onto a postcard bearing the picture of a child from the strife-ridden region in western Sudan and addressed it to local members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

The children, students from the Montebello Jewish Center’s Hebrew School, were the first class to come to the center to write postcards and assemble pins as part of Dolls for Darfur, a project initiated by a national coalition of Jewish organizations.

Gisser, the center’s executive director, says that local, national and international efforts to address the conflict have been woefully inadequate.

Since a 2003 uprising by an African tribal underclass in Darfur, Arab militias known as the Janjaweed have used government support to ruthlessly quell the revolt. The militias have been accused of rampant rape and ruthless destruction. An estimated 300,000 people have died, about 2 million more have been displaced and dispossessed, and the humanitarian catastrophe threatens the rest of the country as well as neighboring nations, particularly Chad.

The parallels between the situation and the Holocaust’s beginnings are eerily clear to Gisser.

He compared the international response to the crisis today to the world’s overall silence following Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia.

“It’s tantamount to approval,” Gisser said. “The inaction, basically, it’s saying to the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed … that they can keep on doing whatever they’re doing.”

Paul Galan survived the Holocaust by remaining in hiding, suffering the horrors of privation and exposure to the bitter elements. The Montebello man is outraged at the widespread persecution occurring in Darfur.

“We have millions for wars … but we cannot prevent genocide,” said Galan, who is on the museum’s board of directors. “Those of us who survived, the outcry has always been ‘never again;’ and it doesn’t matter if it happens to Jews or it happens to Africans or whether it happens to people in the Balkans. It’s happened again, and it’s happening today as we speak and it’s a tragedy. It’s a crying shame on humanity.”

Zach Gensior, 11, has learned about the Holocaust. He knows enough to be alarmed by what is happening in Darfur.

“I know that it’s a town in Africa, and that there’s a lot of controversy going on, like the Arabs are, like, bombing the African tribal towns, and there’s genocide happening, a lot of racial action. I think it’s wrong. They shouldn’t be doing that.”

In order to help people grasp the enormity of the killings, the museum is selling doll pins in addition to green rubber wristbands meant to provoke conversations.

“I’ve done my part,” Zach said. “I’m wearing a bracelet. I bought a pin, and my classmates did, too. And I wrote a postcard and sent it to Hillary Clinton. I hope that the government will start sending food and start helping.”

Gisser said he didn’t think the museum’s involvement with Dolls for Darfur would cause immediate change in that region, but he hoped to change attitudes.

So does Richard Laster, chairman of the Westchester Holocaust Education Center in Purchase. After an annual daylong session on intolerance last year, Westchester students chose to focus their school-based awareness efforts on the Darfur tragedy, he said.

“It’s something that’s very consistent with our teaching, because we use the Holocaust, essentially, as a learning lesson — a horrible learning lesson — on how to avoid future genocides, and here we’re sitting on one right now,” said Laster, who lives in Chappaqua.

In 2004, Darfur native Yahya Osman, along with other Darfur advocates, started the Darfur Rehabilitation Project. The Newark, N.J.-based nonprofit organization is dedicated to spreading information about Darfur and to promoting its eventual reconstruction and revitalization.

Osman’s family, of the Tonjour tribe, had disagreed with the ruling government. Forced to flee, Osman ended up in a refugee camp in neighboring Chad, but feared the reach of Sudanese intelligence there. He decided to come to the United States.

The news from his family is not good.

“Recently, my uncle also got shot in eastern Sudan, when the Sudanese intelligence went to my family’s house to ask them about me. They’re putting pressure on my family to ask me to come back,” said Osman, who lives in Brooklyn. “Myself, I cannot go back.”

Not until things change, at least. For that to happen, Gisser said, the world needs to act.

“We have people who are being murdered because of the color of their skin. In simple terms. And you know, there’s an inaction both by the United Nations and by our government in trying to stop the genocide,” he said. “Now, whether they can stop it or not is one thing. It’s not even on the radar, and not being on the radar is definitely disturbing.

“The whole thing,” he said, “is disturbing.”

To learn more

On the Web

• savedarfur.org

• darfurrehab.org

• dollsfordarfur.org

• www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/36028.htm

To reach the Holocaust Museum and Study Center in Spring Valley, call 845-356-2700.
Multimedia

• Dolls for Darfur raises money, awareness. Go to www.LoHud.com/view