More than 100 students departed New York Saturday night to head to Greenbelt, Maryland, for a trip to the United States Holocaust Museum on Sunday.
The Queens College Hillel planned this year’s “Hillels of New York Trip to The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.” The trip, sponsored by the David and Linda Taub Family, has been sending Jewish and African-American students to the Holocaust museum in Washington DC annually for over a decade.
The program is designed to unite Jewish and African-American students through the mutual historical experience of persecution and suffereing, said trip organizer Itiel Katz. “It’s also to inform people,” Katz said, noting that ” it’s interesting to take a group with no connection at all [to the Holocaust, when] we assume its crucial to other people.”
Students from various campuses within the New York Metropolitan Area participated in the trip. On Sunday morning the group went on a short tour of the capital building before going to the Holocaust Museum for a self-guided tour that is supposed to take around four hours to complete. After visiting the museum, students listened to a presentation from Lynn Williams, an African-American woman who works as a professional educator for the museum. Her presentation was followed by a sit-down dinner.