Heed the lessons of the Holocaust Stamps Project

 

The Cube, filled with 1.5 million stamps, symbolizes the 1.5 million children who were killed during the Holocaust. It's on display at the Foxboro Regional Charter School's middle school lobby. 

This column on the latest wave of antisemitism and the completion of the Holocaust Stamps Project at the Foxboro Regional Charter School with the unveiling of a new exhibit called The Cube, was published in the Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, edition of The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA. The project's message rings truer than ever.
The link to the column on The Sun Chronicle’s Website, with photos by Mark Stockwell, follows: https://www.thesunchronicle.com/opinion/columns/larry-kessler-hate-will-doom-us-all/article_cb76ac38-86c1-5ff2-ac53-f74b31e486ca.html
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News item: Nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, about 245,000 Jewish survivors are still alive in more than 90 countries, according to a new report by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also called the Claims Conference, according to an Associated Press story.
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That item hit home with me and proved timely, coming just days before two Attleboro area news stories showed yet again the importance of combating the alarming resurgence of antisemitism:
* Raw antisemitism, bordering on the kind of gut hatred that led to the extermination of 6 million Jews and 5 million others during the Holocaust, not only continues to be out of control since the Oct. 7 brutal attack on Israel by Hamas, but no community is immune from such hate, as evidenced by the recent voice mail left at Attleboro’s Congregation Agudas Achim. The message left at the synagogue advocated for the killing of Jews and included these words: “It’s time to end Israel and all the Jews” and continued with: “I think we should kill you all.”
(A Millis man, John M. Reardon, 59, has been charged in connection with the incident, and his case is working its way through the courts.)
* Holocaust education has become more vital than ever, especially with the rapidly dwindling number of Holocaust victims and survivors who are still alive.
Both developments were on display, front and center, on the City & Town section cover page of The Sun Chronicle’s Jan. 27-28 Weekend edition.
The first story featured Attleboro Mayor Cathleen DeSimone’s forceful denunciation of the hateful message that was left on the synagogue’s voice mail.
“(Thursday’s) hateful incident involving death threats against our Jewish friends and neighbors and calling for the end of Israel has no home in Attleboro,” the mayor, much to her credit, said on social media.
Meanwhile, just under that story by Staff Writer David Linton was one by Staff Writer George W. Rhodes about the final exhibit of the Holocaust Stamps Project at the Foxboro Regional Charter School. That entailed the collection of 11 million stamps, thanks to the project started in 2009 by then-fifth-grade teacher Charlotte Sheer. After Sheer’s retirement, the project was taken over by then-student life adviser Jamie Droste, and both educators deserve an exceptional amount of praise for their efforts.
As those familiar with my past columns on this insightful and vital project, the Holocaust Stamps Project stemmed from Sheer’s desire to make the lessons of the Holocaust mean something to her fifth-grade students.
My last column on the project was published in The Sun Chronicle last summer following the official opening in June of a new exhibit at the American Philatelic Center in Bellefonte, Pa. --- “A Philatelic Memorial of the Holocaust” featuring the Holocaust Stamps Project’s 11 million stamps and 18 collages made from some of the stamps.
As I wrote at the time, the permanent exhibition at the national museum, run by the American Philatelic Society, preserves the hard work of the students and staff at the Foxboro Regional Charter School, where the stamps were collected from 2009 to 2017.
The entire school, including students in every grade of the K-12 school, and the staff --- as well as the community and the nation --- would get involved in the effort before it was concluded. Indeed, stamps were donated from 48 states and the District of Columbia and 29 countries.
I found out firsthand just how many strangers got involved, when in 2015 while still working full time at The Sun Chronicle, a woman living in Vermont, Alice Dulude, called me to say that her husband Bill, a retired Attleboro firefighter and stamp collector, had bought a box of stamps at a show and wanted to donate it. Their son, Bill Dulude Jr., dropped off the box of 60,000 stamps at the paper, and I turned it over to Sheer.
Such was the enthusiasm and the hopefulness that antisemitism and all forms of hatred could be defeated that the school’s project generated.
But as Rhodes so eloquently reported in his most recent story, the opening of the national exhibit, as it turned out, wasn’t the project’s final chapter.
With both Sheer and Droste in attendance on Friday, Jan. 26, one day before the observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the school unveiled its final exhibit, a 5-foot tall, 3 foot square plastic enclosure that the school calls “The Cube.” Inside this structure in the school’s middle school lobby, are 1.5 million of the stamps collected, which represent the children killed in the Holocaust from 1942 to 1945.
This latest exhibit at the school brings the Holocaust Stamps Project full circle, because the slaughter of children because of blind hatred remains the most terrible evil of all.
That’s why it’s imperative that all warfare in the tinder box that’s the Middle East must be stopped immediately in order that a path to peaceful co-existence can be found. Hatred must have a good chance of ending once and for all --- or else we’ll all be doomed.
The alternative --- a new Holocaust Stamps Project in 10 or 20 years to memorialize those killed because of this new wave of antisemitism getting --- God forbid --- totally out of control is both unthinkable and unacceptable.
Better that the United States and world follow the selfless example of Sheer and Droste in educating people against the evils of the kind of irrational hatred that caused the Holocaust in the first place.
Larry Kessler, a retired Sun Chronicle local news editor, can be reached at larrythek65@gmail.com. He blogs at larrytheklineup.blogspot.com