On a recent Lappin Foundation March of the Living trip to Poland, 17-year-old Marblehead High incoming senior Jack Conley said a trip to the historic Wieliczka salt mine where Jewish prisoners worked in a forced labor camp was especially meaningful for him and other Jewish teens.

“It was one of the times during the trip when my group broke apart from the main group, and I had the opportunity to bond with other kids in a different way,” Conley said in an email about how the experience helped the teens grow as they tried navigating the mines. The experience strengthened the Jewish teens’ connection to one another, Conley said.

During a trip to Poland from June 23-28, the Lappin Foundation provided a once-in-a-lifetime lesson of “Never Again” and an affirmation of Jewish identity for 40 teens from the North Shore, Greater Boston and the Merrimack Valley.

The students visited the death camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek, and toured Jewish cemeteries, a synagogue, museums, monuments, memorials, mass grave sites, Jewish quarters, and ghettos in and around Warsaw, Tarnow, Lublin and Krakow.

The students hailed from 20 communities representing 23 schools. They visited places where thriving populations of Jewish people once lived in Poland before those communities were obliterated by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Incoming Brookline High junior Vivienne Sigel, 16, said in an email she had learned a lot about the Holocaust in the past, but walking into the concentration camps for the first time opened her eyes.

“The second I stood there walking through the gates, it felt surreal. It was nothing I’ve experienced before, and everything that I had heard and learned before weren’t as important as me being there in that moment,” she said.

“Now I have my own perspective with me that I will always keep and use to educate others because no one can take away what I saw with my own two eyes in Auschwitz and in Majdanek,” Sigel said.

The teens on the trip came from Andover, Arlington, Beverly, Brookline, Burlington, Chestnut Hill, Georgetown, Lynnfield, Marblehead, Natick, Needham, Newton, Norwood, Peabody, Salisbury and Sharon. In addition, there were students from Florida and Connecticut. The out-of-state teens are campers at Camp Bauercrest in Amesbury, which is part of Lappin’s service area.

Funding for the trip came from New England Friends of March of the Living and local funders.

Lappin Foundation is used to taking high-school teens on trips to Israel. Its fully subsidized Youth to Israel Adventure in the summer, which Lappin for decades has run to help cement local students’ Jewish identities, has been on pause due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East after the attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, according to President and Executive Director Deborah Coltin. The two-week trip to Israel last ran in 2023.

Meanwhile, the International March of the Living from Auschwitz to Birkenau takes place in the spring on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, either in April or May depending on when 27 Nisan on the Hebrew calendar falls on the Gregorian calendar. This year, the march fell on April 14.

A weeklong educational program in Poland includes visits by students to Holocaust sites and cultural sites where Jews once lived. The spring March of the Living trip then travels to Israel, though that leg of the trip could not be held this year due to war.

New England Friends of March of the Living has been offering subsidies to New England students to take part, Coltin said, but because the kids found it difficult to miss school, this greatly impacted participation by local teens.

The goal of the June trip to Poland was to offer local teens an experience that was similar to the March of the Living trip.

Five days in Poland can cost upwards of $5,000 per student – not just airfare and food, but for all-in expenses such as counselors and insurance, Coltin said. Thanks to New England Friends of March of the Living and other funders, Lappin was able to raise the money necessary to offer the trip for 40 students, she said.

“We saw how impactful this is,” said Coltin, who also attended the trip, “and we will continue this for next year.”

Lappin’s 2027 Y2I trip is scheduled for June 29 to July 14. It will start with the March of the Living Holocaust education trip to Poland from June 29 to July 4 and carry on to Israel from July 4 to July 14.

All in, the trip will cost $11,000 to $12,000 per student, Coltin said.

“Our goal is to always make it fully subsidized,” she said.

A post-trip survey provided by Coltin showed the trip’s impact on students. In all, 100% of the teens said the trip met the goal of helping them fight antisemitism and injustice by witnessing the sites of the atrocities of the Holocaust, while strengthening their Jewish identity.

Sharon resident Irv Kempner, chair of New England Friends of March of the Living, said an important part of the program is helping teens understand what Jewish life was like in Poland before the war. About 90% of Poland’s Jewish population, some 3 million Jews, were wiped out in the Holocaust. That’s equivalent to the entire population living inside Interstate 495, he said.

New England Friends of March of the Living was able to subsidize this recent Lappin trip to Poland. Kempner said the goal is to create awareness around the Holocaust and turn students into Jewish leaders of tomorrow.

“After leaving the camps and learning more about their stories, I feel like we carry part of that responsibility with us,” Conley said. “It is our job to make sure we never forget the Holocaust and never forget what the Jewish population had to go through.”

“Going to the camps and going to the sites where the genocide occurred is me being a part of the movement that will help educate our future generations,” Sigel said. Θ