Holocaust Project Matches Numbers, Names

Some 60 years have passed since the Holocaust — a world away and generations ago. Now, a Woodland Middle School eighth-grader is part of a worldwide effort to give identity to survivors, who were listed only by numbers when they were released.

Jeremy Benjamin, 13, just had his bar mitzvah Dec. 17. He’s officially a man now in Judaism. To his mom, though, he’s just hers. And she really couldn’t be prouder.

“He’s just unique,” said mom Jordie Benjamin. “People that don’t even know him talk about his smile. To be 13 and be so kind-hearted …”

“Jeremy is a bright and a very spiritual boy,” said Rabbi Yitzchok Tiechtel. “He’s very giving, and he wanted to give back.”

Each person going through the bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah process at Chabad of Nashville completes a project of their own choosing. After Jordie Benjamin saw a story on a national news program about World Memory Project, she knew this was perfect for Jeremy’s mitzvah project. And Jeremy loved it. “He was immediately on it,” she said. “He was engrossed by the concept.”

Work makes records searchable

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has millions of documents about survivors and victims of the Holocaust, teamed up with ancestry.com to allow the public to help make the records from the museum searchable by name online for free.

That’s where Jeremy and his mom come in. For maybe an hour at a time, they’ll sit with a laptop and decipher scanned in documents and input the information in an online form, so it can be found. They work on it together because the documents are old, handwritten and sometimes hard to read.

“It gives me goosebump chills,” she said. Her great-grandparents were killed in the Holocaust. Their son, her grandfather, survived. “That generation wouldn’t talk about it,” she said.

Benjamin, who grew up in a Jewish orthodox home in Birmingham, Ala., and her husband, David, moved to Brentwood with their two boys, Josh, 16, and Jeremy, about four years ago.

“We can help make these documents available,” she said. “We’re giving these people back their name.”

Youth won’t give up on project

“I like giving identities,” said Jeremy, who said the project makes the Holocaust more real. He’ll turn 14 on Jan. 31 and plans to keep working on the project with his mom.

The mitzvah project, along with six months to a year of studying a section of the Torah to read aloud, is the preparation for the bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah ceremony that marks maturity in the faith.

“And part of the teaching is about bringing about change in this world,” Tiechtel said.

“You’d be surprised at what they do,” he said. Some youths have helped out with dogs for the blind, long-distance adoption of kids in Israel and helping in Nashville shelters. One he’s working with now has a passion for tennis and wants to help teach it to underprivileged kids.

When Josh Benjamin went through his bar mitzvah about three years ago, he volunteered for months at Happy Tales Humane in Franklin.

“Each person can share the light, and we can’t wait until someone’s an adult to teach them this,” Tiechtel said.