Inside Heschel High
Heschel held its first ever High School Women’s Minyan in honor of Rosh Hodesh. 60 female students opted to join the spirited communal tefillah experience.
Heschel welcomed Idit Etinger, Shlomo Koren,Yuri Levi, And Noam Sharabi from Kfar Azza, Israel to tell their stories of survival. High School students had the opportunity to hear each survivor give a detailed account of their experience and also ask them questions. The Heschel community then gathered for an evening program which also featured a multimedia display of the aftermath of the October 7 attacks.
Heschel partnered with the New York Blood Center (NYBC) to host its second blood drive of the year! Students, faculty, staff, and parents donated blood through NYBC which delivers lifesaving blood products, specialty pharmaceuticals, and high-quality clinical, technical, testing, and consultative services to healthcare providers and patients.
At Grade 9's monthly meeting, Heschel seniors presented a script that they workshopped last year in the English Honors seminar. The script examined, in a series of monologues, the history of the Japanese internment camps during World War II. Voices included General de Witt, some letter-writers from the camps, and Mitsuye Endo, who fought the evacuation orders all the way to the Supreme Court. As the freshmen are currently reading Julie Otsuka's novel When the Emperor was Divine in English class, which is set during this time, the play offered some valuable historical background to the novel.
In Grade 9 English classes, students were introduced to the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel Maus. As a way understanding Spiegelman’s craft, students created their own graphic panels based on photographs compiled in “The Auschwitz Album,” the only surviving visual evidence of the process of mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The album fell into the hands of one of the few survivors of that transport, Lily Jacob, who gave it to Yad Vashem in 1980. Excerpts of the Album can be viewed here. Once they created their own panels, students wrote artists’ statements about their work, explaining which panels from Spiegelman’s novel had inspired them.