Marching Toward What?

7

Alumni of the March of the Living are questioning the techniques
organizers use and the trips' role in educating-Jewish youth.

SHIRA SCHNITZER

Special to The Jewish News

n 1992, Sarah Guzick traveled
with a group of other Jewish
teenagers to Poland to see the
extermination camps and then to
Israel to see the modern state that
Holocaust survivors had built. She
returned from the two-week March of
the Living program Jewishly
`charged." The Houston native set off
on her own "Jewish journey," breaking
up with her non-Jewish boyfriend and
becoming deeply involved in
Holocaust education both within the
Jewish community and at her own,
primarily non-Jewish, high school.
-"I became Miss Jewish Pride," she
says.
Over time, however, Guzick
reached overload; the Jewish charge
within her could not survive on a diet
of tragedy. She was becoming more
Jewish not because of what she found

I

,

Shira Schnitzer is the associate editor of

New Voices, a monthly publication of the
Jewish Student Press Service, in which a
version of this article first appeared.

12/18
1998

8 Detroit Jewish News

beautiful in the religion, but because
of the destruction that had befallen
her people. The March "was simply
too much Holocaust," without
enough of anything else, Guzick says.
More than six years after her trip,
Guzick says the experience brought
her closer to Judaism and she still
believes that a well-planned trip to
Poland is "generally worthwhile," for
the important lessons it teaches about
humanity. But Guzick, a recent gradu-
ate of the University of Texas at
Austin, has rejected the "cult of pere-
cution" which she says the March of
the Living. promotes in favor of
"exploring the more positive reasons
to he a Jew.
She is not alone.
But even as the March continues to
grow in size and prominence — with
2,500 participants last year it is the
single largest Jewish experiential trip
in which North American high school
students participate — some alumni
are asking difficult questions about the
techniques the March's organizers use
and the role the trips should play in
the education of Jewish youth.
"Mv experiences do not resemble the

accounts that you hear about in syna-
gogues or read about in Jewish newspa-
pers," says Jeremy Richler, a graduate of
McGill University and a 1992 partici-
pant in the March of the Living.
The students who shared their sto-
ries had participated in the March
between 1992 and 1995. They repre-
sented communities as disparate as
Montreal and Houston. Yet the strik-
ing similarity of their analyses reveals
that their critiques are hardly idiosyn-
cratic.
In contrast to the reports of those
who claim that the March "changed
their lives," these students describe a
program ill-suited to teenagers, one that
urges emotional responses at the expense
of intellectual understanding, fosters an
irrational fear of anti-Semitism, and uses
the Holocaust to bolster Zionist senti-
ment and Jewish identity.
In 1997 and 1998, Cindy
Friedman, program director of the
Department of Overseas Students at
the Hebrew University Hillel, orga-
nized a panel discussion to let former
marchers talk about their experiences.
Many of the 50 who attended the dis-
cussion expressed serious concerns

about what they had learned and how
they had learned it, with some noting
thar it had taken several vears for thei
concerns to surface.
Explaining students' delayed reac-
tion to the March, Richler says that
the emotional intensity of the trip pre
cluded any critical distance during th
March itself. "I spent two weeks mov-
ing in a fog," he recalls.
One recent Columbia Universiry
Graduate who went on the 1994
March said she didn't start to reexam-
ine her experience until she began to
learn about Judaism in an academic
setting during her first year of college.
The marcher, who asked that her
name not be used, said it makes per-
fect sense that the program is designe
for high school, rather than college
students, because the March is able to
exploit the naivete that goes along
with being in high school. "At that
age," she says, "[teenagers are] like
putty, highly impressionable" and
searching for identity.
Friedman agrees that high school
age "is probably too young. . . Perhap
we should focus on sending college
students; they generally seem more

