Monday was Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), and the Ne’arim students participated in a lesson about the Shoah. They learned some history and talked about what it might have been like to be one of the Jews assigned by the Nazis to oversee other Jews in the ghetto. Then the students were invited to write Holocaust Cinquains.
A cinquain is a five line poem, and in this simplified form consists of a one-word line, a two-word line, a three-word line, a four-word line, and a five-word line. Here are the fruits of the students’ labors.
Hitler
hate Jews
slaughtering 11 million people
bad time to live
Nazis
— authorship unknown
Holocaust
Horrible century
Nazis kill Jewish
Crazy, horrible, fear, terror
Killing
— Jonah
Holocaust
people killing many
lots of death
lots of people died
death
— Cole
Holocaust
Horrible history
Tens of millions dead
Terrifying, horrifying, scary
Death
— David
Genocide
Ruthless killing
Exterminating a culture
Evil, insensitive, hostile, racism
Holocaust
— Adam
Holocaust
Killing many
Jews being slaughtered
Hiding, killing, fear, extinction
Horror
— Theo
Holocaust
Nazis: killed
Jews, Gypsies, gays,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people:
Death
— Miriam
Thanks to the Ne’arim class for engaging so thoughtfully with this painful and meaningful subject.
CBI: From the Rabbi 