The Kleinman Holocaust Education Center (KHEC) has just launched its second annual Student Visual Arts and Literacy Contest, which provides middle and high school students with excerpts from diaries that give firsthand accounts of the Holocaust, and invites them to submit reactions to the readings through creative writing or producing visual art.

2.  The Kleinman Holocaust Education Center (KHEC) has just launched
its second annual Student Visual Arts and Literacy Contest, which
provides middle and high school students with excerpts from diaries
that give firsthand accounts of the Holocaust, and invites them to
submit reactions to the readings through creative writing or
producing visual art.
 The diaries provide students with personal accounts of authors’ faith,
strength, and courage during the Holocaust. The contest is designed
to preserve the memory of the diarists, and to inspire readers to
develop inner strength to meet life’s challenges.
 “Our mission is to provide all people with a better and deeper
understanding of the perspectives and experiences of religious Jews
during the Holocaust, and this contest gives students invaluable
artifacts from that period of time to do just that,” said Elly Kleinman,
President and Founder of the Kleinman Holocaust Education Center.

3.  This year’s contest includes excerpts from three different Holocaust
diaries, and the writings students read are grade-level specific. After
students reflect upon the text, they can choose to write a letter to the
diarist sharing their connections, observations and questions, or, create
a poster promoting the book and encouraging others to read the full
diary.
 The contest is part of programming at the New York-based museum and
education center, which is currently under construction at 1561 50th
Street in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood that is
home to the largest religious survivor community outside the State of
Israel. The Center is currently located in temporary facilities at 5923
Strickland Avenue in Mill Basin.
 The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2016, and winners will be
announced on April 15, 2016. The grand prize for each grade level is
$250. Second place winners will receive $100, and third place winners
will receive $50. This year’s contest will offer a total of nine prizes.
 Submissions for the contest come from schools across the country. Last
year’s winners were high school students in New Jersey and California.
 “The hands-on experience students get from engaging in this kind of
activity enriches their education and understanding of people who lived
during the Holocaust,” said Julie Golding, Director of Education for the
Kleinman Holocaust Education Center. “We very much look forward to
seeing this year’s submissions.”

4.  Students in grades 7 to 8 will read the diary of Rywka Lipszyc (pronounced Rivka
Lipschitz), who was a 14-year old Jewish girl, orphaned and living in the Lodz
ghetto in Poland. The diary spans from October 1943 to April 1944; Rywka was
sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944, and a Red Army doctor reportedly
discovered pages from the diary outside the Auschwitz crematorium during
liberation in 1945. More than 50 years later, the doctor’s granddaughter brought
the diary to be published.
 Students in grades 9 to 10 will read the diary of Hillel
Seidman, an archivist of the Warsaw Kehilla (community), who was a researcher
and author. His diary spans from July 1942 to April 1943, and provides a firsthand
account of the Warsaw ghetto’s last days. The diary was impounded by the
Gestapo and rescued at the war’s end from a cellar.
 Students in grades 11 to 12 will read the diary of Chaim Yitzchok Wolgelernter, a
Torah scholar, businessman, and young father of two children. It was written while
he was in hiding from 1942 to 1944, and crafted as a memoir, with chapter titles
and a table of contents. The author was killed just months before liberation, and
the diary remained untouched in a drawer, unpublished until more than seventy
years later.
 The KHEC is the premier Holocaust institution in the world dedicated to telling the
story of the Holocaust. It has the largest collection of artifacts and documents
from the religious world, which will be made available for scholarly research and
public access. The KHEC broke ground for its permanent home this past March; it
is expected to open in late 2016 or early 2017. In addition, the KHEC is building
annexes in Lakewood, N.J. and Jerusalem, as well as developing permanent and
traveling exhibits throughout Europe.

5.  “We have already acquired a voluminous amount of artifacts and
documents, and are continually working to build our collection
so more initiatives such as this can be made possible,” said
Rabbi Sholom Friedmann, Director of the Kleinman Holocaust
Education Center.
 The contest is sponsored by Meridian Capital Group, LLC, and
additional sponsors include The Jewish Press, Israel Bookshop
Publications, and The ArtScroll Library.
 About the Kleinman Holocaust Education Center
 The Kleinman Holocaust Education Center (KHEC) has its primary
facility in Brooklyn, New York, with future annexes in Lakewood,
New Jersey, and Jerusalem, as well as other exhibitions that are
currently under development in a number of European countries.
The KHEC is a museum dedicated to documenting the micro-
histories of religious Jewish victims, and the role of faith, within
the broader context of the annihilation of European Jewry. The
KHEC fulfills its mission in service to the general public and
students, through extensive educational programs, the
permanent exhibition and archival collections.
 Link to the original article.