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6 million victims, 6 million pennies
In order to help understand the scope of the Jewish tragedy, the Jewish Community Center of the Greater Palm Beaches is collecting six million pennies to commemorate the victims
Ynetnews
Six million, is a number too large to imagine, especially when it refers to the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust.
To help understand the scope of the Jewish tragedy, the Jewish Community Center of the Greater Palm Beaches is collecting six million pennies to honor the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust.
As a silent and constant reminder of the great loss, the Harold & Sylvia Kaplan branch of the center has already stacked one million pennies in a Lucite tower in its lobby.
The Sun Sentinel reported
that JCC volunteers recently completed the first tower, filled with pennies weighing 3,500 pounds. Donors are filling another pillar, which has about 300,000 pennies, at the Hochman branch of the JCC in Boynton Beach. Another tower will be constructed using 200,000 coins.
"Every year, as we teach our children about the most horrific period in Jewish history, we find ourselves puzzled by the impossible task of explaining six million," says JCC Judaic Enrichment Director Yaron Kapitulnik. "How can one grasp the concept, the lives that were taken and those that were never born?"
According to the report, since the project started two years ago, donors have been emptying their wallets, collecting at their synagogues, making requests in their bar or bat mitzvah invitations and sending containers of pennies by mail.
Some were inspired by the film Paper Clips, in which Tennessee students sought to gather 6 million paper clips to honor Holocaust victims, while others say they were motivated by the enormity of the challenge.
In order to add another challenge to the project, the JCC is collecting names and memories of Holocaust victims who may not be registered at Yad Vashem. Kapitulnik told Sun Sentinel that the JCC has gathered about 200 names that have never been reported.
Kapitulnik hopes the penny project will be completed during the coming year. The collected USD 60,000 would be donated to Holocaust remembrance projects.
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