Visit of the Alon Ramat Hasharon School 2019 — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

The visit of the Alon High School students to Beit Vilna, on the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day, has become a tradition, and this year, too, the students visited Beit Vilna.

Beit Vilna places great importance on commemorating the glorious heritage of the Lithuanian community.

It is important for us to present to the younger generation the cultural richness of the community before World War II, and emphasize the magnitude of its destruction and its human and cultural loss.

The students toured Beit Vilna itself, the Memorial Hall, and the Exhibition.

Moshe Michles, a second generation of Holocaust survivors, talked to the students about his largely extinct family, about his mother who lost a husband and son in the Kovno ghetto, was sent to the Stutthof concentration camp, and found superhuman strength to rescue a girl she did not know in that concentration camp.

After the war she married the girl's father (Moshe is their son).

Moshe explained how important it is to research the family history early on when survivors are still alive, and how difficult (though possible) it is to carry out family research when the survivors have died.

Ya'arit Glazer, a second-generation Holocaust survivor, told the story of her family, the origin of her name (Ya'arit) given in Lithuania; she presented a film she shot about the heroic escape of prisoners from the Ninth Fort in Kovno, with her father one of the fugitive leaders. Dozens of fugitives were killed in an attempt to escape from the Fort. Ya'arit managed to document the story of those who succeeded and survived the war and, as mentioned, produced the film.