Morningside Elementary School fifth-graders have been visiting the William Breman Jewish Heritage and Holocaust Museum for more than 15 years in conjunction with the Georgia Performance Standards unit on World War II. Last year, 15 Morningside fifth-graders took part in the 70th anniversary commemoration of Kristallnacht at The Temple on Peachtree Street. This year, the entire fifth-grade class, about 145 students, took part in another meaningful project, making Morningside the first public school to do so.
The project, called Stones of Remembrance, seeks to honor the children who died in the Holocaust and thus were never given a proper burial or marker. The Breman has collected the actual names of hundreds of the 1.5 million children who died in the Holocaust, and each Morningside 5th grader had the opportunity to decorate a stone to honor one of those children by name. The stones will be used in a ceremony on April 11 at the “Memorial to the Six Million” in the Greenwood Cemetery on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.