By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Kelsey Ganes has been seeing a lot of butterflies lately. That’s because the 13-year-old South Seattle student has been overseeing a project to collect as many as she possibly can. The butterflies she is collecting—her goal is to reach a thousand by the beginning of March—are not the living kind. Rather, she is hoping to get children throughout the Puget Sound area to cut out butterflies on paper and color them in, all for an important purpose.
“The Butterfly Project [will] collect 1.5 million butterflies in remembrance of children who perished in HaShoah,” says Kelsey. “What I’m trying to do is have every Jewish child in Seattle submit a butterfly to be hung in the museum.”
Kelsey is speaking of the Holocaust Museum Houston. Colleen LaBorde, who works on educational projects at the museum, says they have collected 50,000 butterflies so far, and they hope to step up efforts around the country in the near future. It’s Kelsey’s hope to help in that effort.
“The symbolism of the butterflies of this project actually came from a poem written by Pavel Friedman,” Kelsey says. Friedman, whose poem “I Never Saw Another Butterfly” has been read widely by children around the world, perished at age 14 in Terezin.
Kelsey is collecting the butterflies for her Bat Mitzvah project. Her family attends Temple De Hirsch Sinai in Seattle. The undertaking for the project has been entirely Kelsey’s. Her mother, Kristine Ganes, says all she does is drive her daughter around to help with the organization.
“I was quite pleased that she was willing to undertake a project of this magnitude,” Kristine says. “My child totally inspires me with her compassion and her empathy.”
Kelsey has done quite a bit to get things coordinated. That includes calling rabbis and schools all around the region.
“I’ve talked to Seattle Hebrew Academy, Jewish Day School, Temple Beth Am, and of course the De Hirsch Religion School,” Kelsey said when the Transcript first spoke to her in January. Since then, she has traveled as far north as Everett and put up posters in Jewish institutions around the Puget Sound region. The response, she says, has been “going pretty well.”
The idea for the project came from an online listserv that Kelsey’s mother receives. Kelsey is home-schooled, and another home-school parent posted information about the project. From there, Kelsey was hooked.
Though she does stay at home for her education, it does not mean she has all the time in the world to dedicate to this project, however. She spends several hours each day with her studies, plus she has online courses and once a week has a live class—at Stanford, in California—where she can see and hear the other students over the Internet.
To aid her project, Kelsey has offered to play guitar at several of the schools, and even made a template to give out to the children at the Jennifer Rosen-Meade Preschool, so they could make the butterflies much more easily. Kelsey says the butterflies should be about four to five inches in diameter, and no strings should be attached to them because the museum will take care of that.
The goal, Kristine says, is to “have them in-house by the end of March, so she can get them down to the museum before Remembrance Day on April 19.”
“It just happens to coincide with her Bat Mitzvah,” she added.
Kelsey does not yet know how many butterflies have been created because she is waiting to pick them up from each of the schools, but she says she’s excited to find out.
Further information on the Butterfly Project can be obtained from Colleen LaBorde at [email protected] or visiting the Holocaust Museum’s Web site at www.hmh.org
Kids who want to take part in this project should cut out the butterfly template on this page—with parental assistance, if necessary—and color away! Finished products should be mounted with a dry glue onto construction paper or a heavy cardstock (like a file folder) and sent to: Butterfly Project c/o The Jewish Transcript, 2041 Third Ave., Seattle, WA 98121. Kelsey’s goal is 1,000, so send in a few, and be sure to include your name, age, and city, and make sure they get to the Transcript offices by March 15.