Ninth-grade students at Harvard-Westlake took their first field trip of the year on Wednesday, April 9, visiting the Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles. Students boarded buses early in the morning for the grade-wide excursion.
The Museum of Tolerance, established in 1993, is dedicated to educating the public about the Holocaust and the persecution of Jewish people during the 1940s.
Mayan Benami, a middle school math teacher and faculty advisor of the Jewish Culture and Antisemitism Awareness Club, was one of the trip’s chaperones.
m“The Museum of Tolerance helps students to understand what antisemitism is and how dangerous it has been historically—not only for Jews but for all the societies in which it has been allowed to manifest,” Benami said.
Students explored several exhibits, including the interactive Social Lab, where they made choices in response to real-world crises. They also viewed realistic models of 1940s Germany and parts of a concentration camp.
“Getting to see the models of the concentration camps was really interesting and really helped me try to understand what it was like for the Jewish people back then,” said Reyaan Jaitly-Pratyoosh ’28.
When asked which part of the museum was most impactful, Caroline Daenzer ’28 said, “I thought the most impactful part of the museum was getting to see the photos of survivors and their stories.”
At the entrance of the museum, students were met by a spiral staircase lined with hundreds of photos of Holocaust survivors, each image accompanied by personal details and stories.
“Getting to read each story was really powerful and hearing about the survivors helped me really understand the true atrocities of the Holocaust. ” Daenzer said.
