Schoolchildren have been assigned to take care of the planted tree in New York
A tree from a Nazi concentration camp was planted in New York near the Jewish Heritage Museum in a ceremony on December 2.
A plaque bearing the inscription “As the branches of this tree, so are the branches of our people” was also affixed near the plant.
This silver maple had been smuggled away by a teacher named Irma Lauscher in Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, where she had been deported in 1943. She thus wished to allow the children in the camp to make the blessing on this tree on the occasion of the Jewish holiday of Tu Bishvat (New year of the trees).
These children then continued to take care of the tree throughout their internment, drawing on their daily ration of water to water it.
Of the 15,000 children imprisoned at Theresienstadt, less than 200 survived. The tree was still in the camp when it was liberated in 1945.
While several cuttings of the plant had been sent to Jerusalem and several American cities in the 1980s, the shrub planted in Manhattan came from one of them.
School children were assigned to care for the tree planted in New York City as part of their school’s Holocaust education program.
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