Rubell Holocaust Remembrance Journeys inspire teen to begin changing the world

When Dan Smith took part in a Holocaust Remembrance Journey to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., it wasn’t through the usual arrangement in which a school sponsors the journey as a field trip. His trip was something he brought about personally, through his own initiative, personal initiative that he has been showing ever since.

Working with the people at Morris Rubell Holocaust Remembrance Journeys, Smith put together the trip himself, as an event to celebrate the first anniversary of his bar mitzvah.

“Fred Heyman, one of the survivors who goes on the trips, did an assembly at my school,” Smith explained. “At the assembly, we handed out pamphlets to sign up for the trip. A lot of people decided to go.”

A few months after his trip, Smith attended a reaction meeting run by Michael Rubell for the people who attended several of the Remembrance Journeys. Among the events at the meeting was a slideshow about Darfur.

“I didn’t know much about Darfur before I saw that slideshow,” Smith recalled, “but it motivated me to do something about it.”

That is precisely what he did. At the meeting, Smith also was told about a Darfur rally in Washington, D.C., which he attended with a few friends. At the rally, he discovered an organization called Help Darfur Now. Smith decided to start a chapter in his middle school.

By that time, it was May of Smith’s last year in middle school. In the remaining month of the school year, the chapter conducted bake sales and sold T-shirts they were supplied by Help Darfur Now. In that one month, they raised $2,000.

When Smith entered high school, he and his friends brought the chapter with them. They’ve conducted a number of activities in support of Darfur relief, including taking a busload of their members to the Global Day for Darfur rally in New York during the first week of school.

The highlight of the first year of the high school chapter was an event that took the whole year to plan, a full day of educational sessions at school, for the entire school.

“We had many speakers come and speak during each period of the day in the school auditorium. They talked to students who came with their classes or who got passes out of their classes so they could come to hear that speaker. Fred Heyman spoke. We had Dr. Jerry Ehrlich, who is a representative of Doctors without Borders. He talked about his own trip to Darfur. We had Arielle Wistosky, the founder of Help Darfur Now, and we had Darfurian refugees.”