On a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem last December, Hannah Miller, now a senior at Seattle’s Northwest School, scanned the map of Eastern Europe, and, as she put it in an article for her school newspaper, “did the math for Eastern Europe’s Jews.”
Romania and Hungary each lost about half of their Jewish populations during the Nazi era. Poland’s Jewish population, which had had a thriving community of three-and-a-quarter million Jews before the war, had dwindled to an eighth of that by the time the Allies defeated Hitler in 1945.
“As I watched families stare at the color-coded map, I realized that many of them would walk away thinking that after the Holocaust and years of Communist regimes, that Jewish life in Eastern Europe had vanished,” she wrote. “I would have thought the same thing had I not traveled to Szarvas, Hungary the summer before.”
Two years ago, Miller got a chance to spend a few weeks in Hungary and attend the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s International Jewish Summer Camp at Szarvas, on a river bank in southern Hungary. The camp was founded in 1991 by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation with the goal of reviving and educating the young people of the Jewish communities within Eastern Europe. Today, 2,000 campers, ages 8—17, attend Camp Szarvas. Miller said it brings together young people from 25 countries from the U.S. to Turkey and beyond in five separate groups.
“The session I was there, in 2006, [had kids from] Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland, and 21 Americans,” she told JTNews. “I didn’t even know there were Jews left in Eastern Europe. I just hadn’t thought about it. I wanted to see what it was like there Jewishly, but I didn’t expect to find much.”
What she discovered at camp was a revelation. Miller found a group of young people from across Eastern Europe eager to rekindle the Jewish traditions that had been all but extinguished, first by the decimation of Jewish communities during the Holocaust, and then by the repression of religion under the Communist regimes that came to power in the late 1940s. As she tells it, the kids have little grounding in Jewish teaching from their families.
Their grandparents were traumatized by the Holocaust and many of them chose not to discuss anything related to it once it was over. As a result, the post-war generation learned little about their heritage that they could pass on to their own children. It is those teenagers who have taken up the mantle of Judaism and who are now learning what they need to know to rekindle the spark.
“It was just really interesting for me to realize that it’s people my age who are becoming the community leaders and are changing it,” she said. After she got home, Miller began to think about what she had learned and looked for a way to go back again. The idea she came up with was a photo project that would tell the stories of the teens she had met, and let people here know that there is more to Jewish life in Eastern Europe than relics.
“I wanted to document this — to return to these countries to photograph and interview people of my generation who are rediscovering their Judaism and helping to rebuild Jewish life in Eastern Europe,” she said.
Miller started by writing to the director of the Ronald Lauder Foundation, without much hope of hearing back, she said. But when she returned from her trip to Israel, she found a message from George Bán, the executive vice-president and CEO of the foundation. He had sent along contact information for school and community leaders in the Ukraine, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania who could help her get the project going. She did some fundraising and applied for grants to pay for her trip, and, last June, Miller went back to Eastern Europe, armed with a camera and a rudimentary knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet.
“At the end of June, I left Seattle for four incredible weeks in Eastern Europe. For the first two weeks, I traveled to Kiev, the Ukraine, Budapest, Hungary, Sofia, Bulgaria and Bucharest, Romania to interview and photograph Jewish youth who were at the age where they could reflect on their developing Jewish identity and community,” she said. “For the next two weeks, I returned to Szarvas, Hungary to participate in an international leadership and counselor training session.
The result is a photojournalism exhibit: “One Child at a Time: The Revival of Judaism in Eastern Europe” which opened November 1 at the F-stop Studio in Pioneer Square. The exhibit combines the pictures Miller shot of the young people she met on her travels with their narratives, recorded in their own words.
Among those she met and recorded were Kirill, an 11-year-old boy who had only learned that he was Jewish three years ago. At first, she said, he was shocked and unhappy, but as time passed he began to learn more about what it means to be Jewish.
“Now,” she said, “he considers himself absolutely a part of the Jewish community in Kiev. He views himself as an inhabitant of two worlds: Jewish and Ukrainian, and [he] is comfortable with the duality of this identity.”
In Sofia, Miller spent a day with Rosen, who she describes as “an 18-year-old ponytailed Bulgarian” whose grandparents were killed in Macedonia during the Holocaust.
“[Rosen] learned about Judaism from attending Sunday school, Jewish camps, and from the Zionist youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair Bulgaria,” she recounted. Miller said the Bulgarian teen told her it is dangerous to be an active Zionist in Sofia, but that they do not care about the danger and are committed to their cause.
When the exhibit comes down after Thanksgiving, Miller said she plans to work with Ilana Cone Kennedy, the director of education at the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center, to develop it as an educational program for use in the schools.
Reviving their history
