A Sarasota theatre project inspired by the friendship between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel seeks to revive an alliance that took shape in the 1950s and 60s among Black and Jewish people in the United States.
"They forged a relationship of mutual respect, but also collaboration. And they fought for civil rights and against civil wrongs," said Bette Zaret, director of Holocaust education programming at the Jewish Federation in Sarasota.
In her view, the rise in racism and antisemitism, along with so much dispersion cast on the "other" in today's society, was troubling. She wanted to illuminate the personal struggles of people in the Holocaust and the Jim Crow era, and show teenagers the commonality between the two groups.
For Zaret, a 2020 documentary called Shared Legacies was another spark. She knew about a program called Witness Theatre in New York, in which teenagers interview Holocaust survivors and re-enact scenes from their lives.
Zaret wanted her program to go further, across racial and generational lines, so she reached out to Walter Gilbert, a longtime civic leader who grew up in Newtown and led the local chapter of the NAACP.
"That one-on-one experience with this kid asking really personal questions about my lived life, and coming from, not a critiquing thing, but wanting to know. I got very emotional. I broke down.”Walter Gilbert
"So, we came up with this idea where we would take six Jewish students and six Black students," Gilbert said. "We would pair the Jewish students with six Black community elders, and take the Black students and pair them with six Holocaust survivors."
The students learn skills in interviewing and meet with the elders to hear their first-hand accounts of living through racial and ethnic strife.
"That one-on-one experience with this kid asking really personal questions about my lived life, and coming from, not a critiquing thing, but wanting to know," Gilbert recalled. "I got very emotional. I broke down."
For Leo Harley, 81, a retired publishing executive, the exchange was similarly powerful. He met with Ava Donoghue, a Jewish student who is a sophomore at Booker High, and talked about his first experience with racism.
Harley was raised in Westchester County, New York, and traveled to Florida to see family during "those drive-through days of the 1950s when you didn't stop at night. And the reason you didn't because as an ethnic person, as a Black person, it was dangerous," he said.
Harley and his uncle, Ben, did stop one fateful night, however, for gas, and Harley needed to use the restroom. He remembers asking where it was, and hearing, "around back." That likely meant outside the station, since Black people were not allowed to use the same facilities as white people.
“We cannot stop and say, ‘This isn't my problem.’ It's all of our problems, and we all must be truth-sayers.”Leo Harley
But, unaware, Harley, who was then just 6 years old, strode into the men's bathroom.
"There was a person there standing at a urinal that turned to me as I walked through the door and said, 'What are you doing in here?' And I said, 'I'm going to the bathroom.' He said, 'No, you're not. There's no place in here for you.' And I ran. Ran toward my uncle, Ben,'" he said.
Harley recalled hearing shouting, "No, no, no!"
His uncle, who was in the military, raised his gun and pointed it at the white man.
"And this is what he said to him: 'He's not familiar with the ways of the South. He was brought up in the North. We don't want you to follow us down the road. We don't want to meet anyone down the road. We're going to just go on, and pay you for the gas,'" Harley said.
"I didn't realize how serious it was until we got to Marianna," Harley recalled. "He told that story to my aunt, and she said, 'You could have all been killed.'"
"It still bothers me," said Harley, quietly.
He had only seen his aunt cry twice in his life — that night, and at her husband's funeral.
For him, the message to youth is: "We cannot stop and say, 'This isn't my problem.' It's all of our problems, and we all must be truth-sayers."
The Holocaust survivors who take part were children themselves when the atrocities of World War II happened, said Shepard Englander, CEO of the Jewish Federation.
"It's only been in their later years that they've realized that as painful as it is to talk about the horrors of losing their parents and siblings in front of them and having to live in holes or under buildings or in the forest, that it's their responsibility to make people understand what happens when society breaks down, and good people don't fight for each other," Englander said.
As part of the program, students take field trips with the elders to the Florida Holocaust museum in St. Petersburg, and a trolley tour of Newtown to visit Black historical sites.
"We went to see some of the places in Sarasota where Black people could and couldn't go," said one of the Holocaust survivors, Helga Melmed, 98. "The beach was prohibited to them."
Melmed was born in Berlin and remembers when certain places became off-limits for Jews, too, like movies, parks, and stores. Then, Nazis burned down her school.
"We knew that things were getting bad because there were parades and different things. We were excluded from everything," she said.
Then, the night of mass arson and terror known as Kristallnacht, in 1938.
"But Kristallnacht, it all ended because they burned down all our books, all our school, everything," Melmed said.
"It's important to think things out for themselves and do the right thing rather than just follow the crowd."Helga Melmed
She told of how she was sent to the Lodz ghetto, a slave-labor camp in Poland, where her parents died.
"My father was killed in the ghetto by the soldiers for target practice. And my mother got very sick and passed away on my birthday," Melmed said.
She was 14 then. By the time the war ended, in 1945, she was 17, and near death herself from starvation, tuberculosis and typhus. She said she tells the Florida students everything, because they must learn this history.
"Because it's important to think things out for themselves and do the right thing rather than just follow the crowd," she said.
The students are moved by the experience, and create a piece of art, poetry, music or dance based on what they learned. The culmination of the program is a performance where the students share their art. Impact Theatre is now in its third year.
"There is a general desensitization to racism now, and I think it's even more prevalent than ever," said Donoghue, 16, the student who interviewed Harley.
"I became so immersed in the program, and so interested about my own faith and about how other religions play an aspect in people's lives, and how racism and slavery are still prevalent in our society today, and how they can impact kids," Donoghue continued.
She wrote a poem, which says, in part:
"I haven't faced that exact fear, but I know what it's like to feel different, to hear whispers about who I am. To carry the history of my people on my back like a story I didn't choose but cannot ignore."
Grace Prophete, a Black sophomore who is home-schooled and interviewed three Holocaust survivors, will perform songs on the piano to honor them, including "Winter Waltz."
"I learned so much from that program. My whole worldview shifted," Prophete said. "Knowing my history and what my people went through when they were persecuted, and hearing what they went through during the Holocaust, made me realize that we didn't go through similar things, but we experienced similar emotions and breakthroughs," said Prophete.
Both Donoghue and Prophete said they see a lot of discrimination, antisemitism and racism among young people today. And they hope they can be agents of change.
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