School News Nationwide

article from the Oct. 18 NY POST Words of Bonds at MSG

By Stephen Witt

When it comes to the Holocaust and slavery in America, the rallying call to ‘Never Forget’ is one of the major themes of the Brooklyn-based non-profit School News Nationwide (SNN).
The organization embraces this theme most fully through its Words of Bonds project and its Madison Square Garden event on Sunday, Oct 18, which pays tribute to Holocaust survivors, senior descendants of slaves and educators concerned with this sordid aspect of human history.
“We started the Words of Bonds project about two years ago after we took a poll of New York City high school kids to see how many had knowledge about the Holocaust and African-American slavery and to our dismay not many did,” said SNN Executive Director Bill Tingling.
Tingling said students in the survey answered that as little as 200 died in the Holocaust instead of the six million Jews, and that as little as 500 Africans died instead of the 60 million during the 400-year transatlantic slave trade journey.
The SNN publishes a newspaper distributed in some 40 schools citywide, and part of its mission through the Words of Bonds project is to make sure such human atrocities never happen again, he said.
“The advantage we have now is there are Holocaust survivors that are still alive, and going from school to school where students can see and touch this person,” said Tingling, adding students can hear the tales survivors tell of losing mothers, fathers sisters, brothers and children during the Nazi rein of terror.
The project will also include making two million DVDs where survivors tell their stories and that will be distributed to all the students throughout the city.
Children must know these stories so that future laws ensure such inhumanity never occurs again, said Tingling.
As for the upcoming Oct. 18, Madison Square Garden dinner event, it is billed as a Commemorative Evening to Honor, Reflect & Remember featuring Holocaust survivors, senior descendants of slaves and educators.
Amongst the honorees are Rev. Charles Leonard, a 107-year-old descendant of slaves, and Miriam P. Groner, a 103-year-old Holocaust survivor.
Several of the honorees also Brooklyn connections including Holocaust survivors Dr. Jay Sommers and Sally Frishberg, along with City Council member Letitia James.

Telling Two Stories With One Voice

by Steve Lipman

Bill Tingling, founder of a Brooklyn-based literacy project that teaches public school students the fundamentals of journalism, was looking for a new way to discuss prejudice a few years ago. Have the students — mostly from the minority community — interview Holocaust survivors, suggested an Irish friend of Tingling.

The result was Words of Bonds, a two-year-old initiative that has resulted in online interviews (www.wordsofbonds.com), speeches by survivors in public schools, an in-the-works documentary, and a kosher tribute dinner Sunday, Oct. 18, 6 p.m. at Madison Square Garden’s MSG Theater. Several Holocaust survivors and descendants of slaves, and educators, will be honored at the dinner, which Tingling says is probably the first-such interracial event under the auspices of an organization with roots in the black community.

One of the honorees will be Tal Brody, the former Israeli basketball star, who will be attending the New York Knicks-Maccabi Tel Aviv exhibition game in the Garden earlier that day.

“We’re bearing witness” to two communities’ experience with prejudice, says Tingling, who in 1995 established School News Nationwide (SNN), a nonprofit multimedia educational group. “If you don’t tell people about [the background of] the Holocaust and slavery, it’s going to repeat itself,” Tingling says. (For information: [718] 753-9920; bill@wordsofbonds.com.)
“Focusing on the preservation of stories from survivors of the Jewish Holocaust and accounts from the descendants of African American slaves, students will be able to examine the connections between these destructive events, as well as make links to currents events,” according to the organization’s mission statement.

Holocaust-denying statements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad give the project greater urgency, he says.

Words of Bonds is not specifically designed to improve relations between the Black and Jewish communities, though that may be a side-effect, says Rev. Paul Chandler, a coordinator of the upcoming event who was active in the Project CURE dialogue group after the 1991 Crown Heights riots.

The project’s focus is the two groups’ accomplishments, not their victimhood, Tingling says.

“I’m not a victim,” says Sally Frishberg, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who will be honored at the Words of Bond event. A resident of Flatbush, Brooklyn, she was among a dozen members of her extended family saved from the Shoah by a sympathetic Polish farmer. After liberation, she moved to the U.S., worked as a public school teacher, then became a docent at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust and a speaker at local schools, telling how she rebuilt her life here. “I don’t think of myself as a victim,” she says.