Chapman University’s Holocaust Art and Writing Contest, which has welcomed some 150,000 middle school and high school participants from Orange County, across the country and around the world, celebrated its 25th anniversary in March.
As part of the program, participating students are asked to watch testimonies recorded by Holocaust survivors or rescuers and respond through their own creative work – essays, poems, visual artwork and film. Representatives from each school, along with their teachers, attend the awards ceremony and reception where students and survivors meet.
Winners also participate in a four-day summer study trip to the Holocaust Museum LA, the Japanese American National Museum and other sites in Los Angeles. They also meet with members of The 1939 Society, a community of Holocaust survivors, descendants and friends.
“We have always sought in diverse ways to build a connection between students and the survivor,” says Marilyn Harran, who is the founding director of Chapman’s Rodgers Center for Holocaust History. The opportunity to engage with survivors as individuals and not just statistics is the first step in building empathy, and showing students that Jewish lives are not so different.
“There are so many different people who are touched by this contest,” says Abigail Stephens ’26, a Chapman history major whose poem won first prize when she was a student at Canyon High School in Anaheim, Calif. This year, she served as a contest judge. For Stephens, the highlight of the whole experience is the opportunity to interact with Holocaust survivors and educators, and to see them as people who have built fully-rounded lives post-tragedy.
This generation of students will be the last to meet a Holocaust Survivor in person — a fact pointed out by William Elperin, president of The 1939 Society, when he first proposed the contest to Harran 25 years ago. “The contest spreads awareness of survivors’ stories, teaches us the lessons of the Holocaust and creates links between survivors and future generations,” Elperin said. “We now must all work harder to teach and learn the lessons of the Holocaust, so it never happens again.”
Visit chapman.edu/holocaust-arts-contest to learn more and see this year’s award-winning entries.