SECOND ANNUAL FELDMAN FAMILY-PJCRP AWARDS FOR POLISH STUDENTS ANNOUNCED. JEWISH CEMETERY DESTROYED DURING WAR TO BE REDEDICATED

New York, May 10, 2006 – Six students in the town of Ilza, Poland, are winners of the second annual Feldman Family-Polish Jewish Cemetery Restoration Project awards to be presented in Ilza on May 22. The awards will be presented during the rededication of the Jewish cemetery in Ilza. The cemetery was destroyed during World War II and recently restored with funds collected in Canada, the United States and other countries.

The students attend the high school in Ilza, a town of about 5,500 located 75 miles south of Warsaw. They wrote essays, stories and poems about Jewish history in the town. Prior to the war, Ilza, known in Yiddish as Drildz, had a population of about 4,500, about one-third of them Jews. The Jewish residents of Ilza were deported to the Treblinka concentration camp in October, 1942. The awards are to be presented by descendants of the Feldman family from New York and Toronto.

The scholarship project was initiated by Barbara Sontz, of Manhattan, whose mother, Ida Schenker, was born in Ilza in 1918 and left with her family in 1927 for the United States. Sontz, an information technology consultant and avid genealogist, has traced her Feldman family roots in Ilza back to early 1800s. Sontz created the scholarship fund at the suggestion of Norman Weinberg, executive director of the Polish Jewish Cemetery Restoration Project, in East Amherst, N.Y., an organization that supports cemetery restorations in Poland.

"It's very encouraging to read what the younger generation has to say about the history of the Jews in their town. They addressed the issue of the Holocaust and remembrance very sensitively," said Sontz. "The older generation, the people who lived through the war, still don't like to talk about what happened there."

The cemetery restoration project was undertaken by a committee from the Toronto Drildzer Congregation and Society along with the PJCRP. The cemetery wall was rebuilt, and gate and monument installed. The gravestones were removed during World War II for use as paving stones. Numerous local officials as well as a delegation of 19 descendants of Jewish residents of Ilza from Canada, the United States and Brazil are to take part in the dedication ceremony.

Student winners of the writing contest are: Kamila Derlatka (1st place, essay, "Jews—Our Neighbors Yesterday and Today); Wiktor Baszczyk (2nd place, essay, "Jews —Our Neighbors Yesterday and Today" ); Ewelina Rola, (1st place, short story, "Sparks"); Monika Dziwisz (first place, poem, "We Cannot Forget"); Estera Szymanska, (2nd place, poem, "Everyone Should Remember"); Tomasz Skiba (3rd place, poem, "Endlosung" (“Holocaust”).

Excerpters from Ilza Student’s Writing Contest winners

People say that a human being is good because of nature. He is able to believe, he is able to think and to love. History denied it about 6 million times. What can we feel after so many crimes, how to justify all of them? I feel shame and anger. Shame, because like them, I am a human. Anger, because I cannot justify them, and I would like to turn back time so much and to shout at them with all my power and order them to open their eyes and see not a Jew, but their own reflection.
--Ewelina Rola. "Sparks"

From the very beginning Jews had to wander and fight for their lives. In spite of Jewish tragedy, many Polish people did not notice their misery and what they had to experience during the Holocaust and the Second World War. The Poles are often prejudiced against Jews. It shows ignorance and lack of interest in historical events from that period of time…. There are not many people who are interested in the history of Jewish nation. I hope it will change, even among my peers, if I try to describe it.
--Kamila Derlatka, “Jews – Our Neighbors Yesterday and Today”

The remembrance of those days
Will last forever
And never will we forget
The meaning of the Auschwitz chimneys
The mass graves
And the tragedy of the Jews

Let the remembrance of those years
And the Nazi Holocaust
Remain in our memory
To be a reminder of the human right
To live in freedom
In a free country
-- Monika Dziwisz. "We Cannot Forget"

As grandpa spoke to Roman:
All the neighbors they were Jews
I remember before the war

Where are all the Purim songs?
Where are all the burial cries?
Everything has flown away
turned to fumes, turned to smoke
rotting in the ground
I'm still here
telling stories to my grandson
and he's listening, listening..
--Tomasz Skiba, "Endlosung"

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Contact: Barbara Sontz, 212-873-7347
After May 15, bsontz@aol.com


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