Last winter, four women who survived the Holocaust attended a movie about their own lives and stories. The director attended, too. Her name is Ariella Bernstein, and she goes to Shepard Middle School in Deerfield.

Bernstein got the idea when her mother invited her to an event at CJE SeniorLife Weinberg Community for Senior Living in Deerfield, during the time she was pondering what she would do for her bat mitzvah project.

She interviewed the women over the course of several months at Weinberg, where her mother is Community Outreach Liaison. She also interviewed their friends and family members.

The survivors ranged in age from 88-90. Two came from Poland, one from Latvia, and one from Greece. Each had a unique story: One survived a concentration camp; one endured a labor camp; one was hidden in a house by a neighbor, and one hid in a cave for more than two years.

Once the interviews were completed, Bernstein edited them into an hour-long video. The completed movie had about 15 minutes for each survivor’s story, and included photos from their lives. She also gave videos of the complete interviews, each more than an hour long, to the survivors’ families.

More than 170 people attended the December screening at Weinberg-the interviewees’ friends and family, including some of their great-grandchildren, as well as other residents and staff. The screening was part of a celebration for the women, complete with a live klezmer band.

But Bernstein didn’t stop there. She knew that the survivors had lost siblings in the Holocaust, young Jews who had never gotten bar or bat mitzvahs of their own. So she incorporated their names into her January bat mitzvah ceremony at Shir Hadash Synagogue in Wheeling, with empty, tallit-draped chairs on the bimah. Ariella led the entire two-hour service, read from the Torah, and spoke of her reading and her project in her speech.

Then she went one step further to honor those fallen children. Ariella had trees planted in their honor in Israel, in a special grove commemorating the 1.5 million children killed in the Holocaust.

Now, Bernstein is offering to share her video with schools, hoping to show it to seventh and eighth grade classrooms.

Bernstein said she hopes to impart the survivors’ messages to others. “After everything I went through, I never turned my back on God,” one said. Said another: “I was born Jewish and I will die Jewish. I could have changed my name or hidden my identity many times, but never did.” n
CJE SeniorLife is a partner with the Jewish United Fund in serving our community.