YIR: Westminster Students Re-Queue for Jewish Culture Trip

Earlier this year, the AJT reported a riveting story where prominent Jewish alums of The Westminster School sponsored student and teacher/escorts to explore Jewish culture abroad.

This coming January, a cohort of Upper School students from Westminster will once again have the opportunity to explore Jewish culture, antisemitism, and the psychology of hate through a special course built around immersive study and travel to Poland and the Czech Republic.

The course, “Voices of Resilience,” takes place during JanTerm, which is a three-week special session in which all Upper School students study a topic in depth through a single experiential, interdisciplinary course. There are more than 40 courses to choose from, and those that involve international travel, like “Voices of Resilience,” require an application process. For this upcoming trip, a whopping 71 students applied to participate in the course and 19 were accepted, which is the maximum number for the course.

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“Voices of Resilience” starts with a visit to Atlanta’s Breman Museum in Midtown, where students explore the museum’s exhibits and have the opportunity to talk with a Holocaust survivor. The travel component of the course takes the cohort to Washington, D.C., to go to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum before continuing on to Poland and the Czech Republic. From Warsaw to Krakow to Prague, students spend time at a range of historic sites, including concentration camps, museums, and synagogues. Hands-on experiences like challah baking lessons, volunteering at the Jewish Community Centre of Krakow, and sharing Shabbat dinner at the Chabad House Prague further immerse the students in local Jewish communities and encourage intercultural dialogue and exchange.

“Although the course syllabus and itinerary of field trips both here and abroad will be largely the same as in the two previous years of Voices of Resilience, the global context has changed drastically,” notes Adam Koplan, director of performing arts at Westminster. Koplan served as a faculty chaperone for “Voices of Resilience” last year and will accompany the group again in 2024. He continued, “This trip, so powerful in years past, promises to be all the more so this year given the terrifying rise of antisemitism globally. We hope that we are creating witnesses and activists who will always stand against antisemitism and indeed all forms of hate, with passion and clarity.”