Westminster’s Holocaust Program Permanently Funded

The Voices of Resilience program at The Westminster School in Buckhead which, for the past five years, has given a number of students at the prestigious private school an immersive experience of the Holocaust, now has permanent funding.

The family of one of last year’s participants has agreed to provide an endowment for the program that will underwrite the expenses of at least 18 students each year to travel to former centers of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and to experience firsthand at least two of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps of World War II.

The endowment is being renamed to honor Robert Ratonyi, a Holocaust survivor who spoke at Westminster this year. He has been a frequent speaker over the past 15 years in gatherings large and small, to audiences of Jews and non-Jews, about his experiences during the Holocaust and his life afterwards. He lost his father and 14 close relatives during the German occupation of Hungary.

The program began six years ago, when Jack Halpern, whose grandparents died in the Holocaust, was on the board of directors at Westminster. At the time, he was concerned that a number of Jewish parents were passing up the private school because there was not much there to attract them to the school.

“I went to speak with the president of the school,” Halpern recalls, “because I was concerned that Jewish parents weren’t considering Westminster as often as they were some of the other private schools that they were sending their children to, and I said, I also noticed that there’s not much that is taught in terms of Jewish history or the Holocaust to the students there. And I wondered if perhaps some change could be implemented to address those concerns.”

What resulted from that conversation is a program called Voices of Resilience, in which junior and senior class students, both Jewish and non-Jewish, compete for a place in an intensive program of Holocaust education. This year, 81 students applied for 18 slots that were available. One of them was Izzy Winarsky, who had grown up in a family with a strong Jewish identity who was surprised by all that she learned right from the start about the Holocaust and its impact.

“During those three days, when we were still in Atlanta, I learned so much I didn’t know about what happened then. And one of the girls that I went on the trip with, I’d gone to Sunday school with for probably 10 years, and we both said the same thing, wow, we had no idea. about how antisemitism starts, and, how hate develops.”

The 12-day program included an all-expense paid trip to Warsaw and Krakow in Poland and Prague in Czechoslovakia to study the rich history of Jewish life there. The students were required to keep a daily journal of their thoughts during the journey and when they returned to Atlanta the group created two video projects about what they saw.

A highlight of the trip was a visit to the Majdanek Concentration Camp outside Lublin in Poland, about an hour by train from Warsaw. Snow was falling on the cold January day, and the camp had few visitors. The Westminster students and Winarsky were alone with their thoughts.

“I really can’t put it into words, but when you try to put yourself in other people’s shoes it’s a gut-wrenching experience. It was very, very quiet, and it seemed so peaceful. But then you … realize that … this, is where all those thousands of people died and it leaves you without anything more to say.”

That sense of something profound happening in these young lives is what motivated the family of Lou and Tom Glenn and their daughter, Rand Glenn Hagen, to provide permanent financing for the program with a seven-figure endowment. Rand Hagen’s daughter was one of last year’s participants.

The announcement of the gift was a gratifying moment in Halpern’s campaign to bring a greater sense of Jewish history to Westminster. It was, after all, a school that began 75 years ago as a project of the North Avenue Presbyterian Church in downtown Atlanta. He now takes pride in how his action as a concerned Jewish parent is going to live on as a testament to Jewish survival.

“The name of the course is Voices of Resilience. And the most important thing to remember is that we are resilient. People have remained proud of being Jewish, are proud of how, despite the terrible things that have happened, we have been able to rekindle Jewish life, even in those many places where it might have been extinguished.”