The ShadowLight Cattle Car, an immersive museum, visited the high school from May 10 through May 12. The exhibit allowed students to stand in a replica of the cattle cars that transported Jewish people to concentration camps during the Holocaust, a systematic genocide of approximately 6 million Jews and 5 million others between 1941 and 1945. The car displayed the atrocities of the Holocaust with projected photographs, videos and statistics, giving students a chance to further their education on the Holocaust on both a factual and emotional level.

Cattle cars carried up to 150 people, all crowded into each windowless, locked car. The harsh conditions of the cars caused death and sickness, according to the ShadowLight website.

The projected videos in the cattle cars included testimonies from Holocaust survivors. Social Studies Curriculum Coordinator Gary Shiffman, who helped to organize the exhibit, said many Jewish people have been recently considering how to commemorate, memorialize and teach about the Holocaust, as the last generation of Holocaust survivors grows older.

“There’s something very moving and powerful about having live testimony to an atrocity. When you hear it, it’s real in other ways. Sometimes just having someone tell you the story can be profoundly moving,” Shiffman said.

School Curriculum Committee member Helen Charlupski is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. Charlupski said having witnesses of the Holocaust share their stories enhance students’ learning.

“I think in general, students take in better experiences than reading something in a book. This can be a precipitant to them to much more in depth discussion. I think when you experience something viscerally, it has an impact,” Charlupski said.

Junior Yuval Levy, a member of the Jewish Student Union (JSU), said the population of Jewish students at the high school is a rarity, with less than one percent of the world being Jewish.

“So, to have such a Jewish school is amazing because the chances of you or your friend or someone that you care about or someone that’s in your class being Jewish is very high,” Levy said.

According to Levy, the exhibit offers a way for students to empathize with their peers.

“I think that there is a lack of education at this school about Jewish culture in general, but specifically the Holocaust,” Levy said. “With all of the anti-Semitism that we see and all the swastikas that are drawn on the walls of bathrooms stalls, [it’s important] to have an exhibition like this for people to understand exactly what the Holocaust was and how difficult it is for their Jewish friends and peers to have had their family live through such a traumatic experience.”

Charlupski said she hopes the cattle car exhibit will influence students in ways that will impact their future actions and thoughts.

“With any kind of racist or anti-Semitic actions, it’s important for students to understand how they affect people,” Charlupski said. “It’s our job as educators to make sure that history doesn’t repeat itself.”