Another swastika found in Danvers School

Another swastika has been found at a Danvers school, causing concerns about anti-Semitism in the community.

The graffiti was found in a girls’ bathroom at Holten Richmond Middle School last week, Town Manager Steve Bartha said.

In November and December of last year, two other swastikas were found in a boys’ bathroom at the middle school, and one was found in a Danvers High School girls’ bathroom.

“It’s discouraging,” Bartha said. “I don’t think there’s hate in the hearts of these kids. Kids are sponges, and they absorb what they’re exposed to. When you see and hear people who lived through the holocaust, it puts a swastika in a very different light.”

Bartha had the chance to experience that at Danvers High School this year during a six-week symposium offered by the Salem-based Lappin Foundation, whose mission includes holocaust education and commemoration.

“I have been a holocaust educator for decades, but just in the last five years, it’s taken on a growing urgency,” said Deborah Coltin, the nonprofit’s executive director. “The symposium is not a one-time lesson. It’s a deeper dive into the holocaust and hatred and what it means to speak out when you see it or hear it.”

After December’s incident, Danvers High School Principal Adam Federico invited the Lappin Foundation to hold a symposium there. Out of 800 students, only about 30 opted to meet for two hours once a week alongside members of the community.

They read Judith Sherman’s “Say the Name,” a holocaust survivor’s survivor account of life as a  teenage girl in a Nazi concentration camp. They also count to hear three other survivors’ stories of life under Hitler’s regime.

“It was powerful for all of us,” Federico said. “The symposium demonstrated our commitment to respond in a powerful way to these kinds of incidents,” he said, referring to the swastikas.

Tess Wallerstein, a Jewish Danvers High School junior who is participating in the symposium, “very upsetting.”

“There’s not many Jewish kids in Danvers,” she said. “It’s also very frustrating because the people who do this may not realize the significance of the statement they’re making when they draw something like that.”

 

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/vJkyEOf