Butterfly Project taking wing in its 11th year

Cheryl Rattner Price displays one of the butterflies that she, herself, painted. The project hopes to install 1.5 million of them around the world

 

By Donald H. Harrison

Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO – Off to a caterpillar’s start in its first decade, the worldwide Butterfly Project, which began in 2006 at the San Diego Jewish Academy, today in its 11th year has taken wing and is gathering momentum and supporters.

Cheryl Rattner Price, who cofounded the project with former SDJA principal Jan Landau, says as of today approximately 150,000 painted clay butterflies representing children who perished in the Holocaust have been placed in displays in 20 U.S. states and in 15 other countries.  Impressive as that number may be, it is only one-tenth the way toward the goal of representing each of the 1.5 million juvenile victims of the Holocaust.

In the last year, however, things have begun to look up, according to Rattner Price.  The Butterfly Project became a recognized non-profit organization, eligible for tax-deductible contributions, and it received a $30,000 matching grant from a local foundation that prefers anonymity.  Beyond that, the Butterfly Project’s documentary film, Not The Last Butterfly, has been well received at various film festivals, both Jewish and general, expanding the project’s outreach.

Rattner Price told this interviewer that something magic can happen when people confront the Holocaust through their own art, painted onto the wings of the clay butterflies.

For example, she said, when the project was unveiled in Sderot, the Israeli city adjacent to the Gaza Strip, which had suffered numerous rocket attacks, one little girl in attendance had been so traumatized by the violence that she hadn’t spoken a word in months.  However, after painting one of the butterflies, she began to smile and once again started talking.

Art, whether visual or written, helped the Nazis’ prisoners in the Czech ghetto of Terezin to cope with the violence that was their fate.  Known by the Germans as Theresienstadt, the show ghetto was briefly were a young prisoner named Pavel Friedman wrote a stirring poem about never seeing another butterfly.  This provided the symbolic background of the Butterfly Project.  Today, in Sderot, where Jewish children again are facing unbelievable violence from an enemy people, art again provides solace, according to Rattner Price.

Closer to home, she said, a Butterfly Project-Holocaust Education team consisting of Landau and second generation survivors Sonia Fox Ohlbaum and Arlene Keeyes recently visited a middle school in the Tierrasanta section of San Diego, where one sixth grader had been expressing Nazi sympathies.

Ohlbaum showed a striped prison uniform that her father had been wearing when he escaped a Nazi concentration camp.  Keeyes showed a family photo, and explained that none of the family members would have existed if a parent hadn’t survived the Holocaust.

“The teacher went over to this one boy who was just sobbing uncontrollably at his desk—the teacher was so compassionate – and the boy went on to say that he hadn’t understood and that he was so sorry,” Rattner Price quoted Keeyes as saying. “Right in front of us we saw someone’s life perspective change.  So the Butterfly Project is not just about painting a butterfly; it is about compassion.”

I asked Rattner Price if her family had a Holocaust history.  She replied that whereas distant branches of the family had been wiped out, no one in her direct line had been a survivor.  In fact, she said, the lack of direct connection to the Holocaust at first had intimidated her; she felt that perhaps she had no right to take such an active role in such a project.  But members of the New Life Club of Holocaust survivors reassured her.  Not only did they approve of what she was doing, they got enthusiastically behind her.

At the time, Rattner Price was a parent of a student at San Diego Jewish Academy, which had relocated to a large campus in the Carmel Valley area.  Supported by the administration of the school, she began the Butterfly Project, creating the butterflies and having students and volunteers paint them.  The idea, you might say, was borrowed from “The Paper Clips Project” in which students at a school in the small town of Whitwell, Tennessee, collected Six Million paper clips (and more) to represent the Six Million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.   Of those Six Million, One and a Half Million were the children whom the Butterfly Project seeks to memorialize.

In tandem with Holocaust education, the Butterfly seeks to initiate healing discussions about violence, bullying, anti-Semitism, and racism, all of which, unfortunately, are problems throughout the United States.

If a school, church, JCC, museum, or any other group would like to join in the effort to remember the innocent 1.5 million children whose lives were snuffed by the Nazis, they can do so via the website thebutterflyprojectnow.org.

For a $180 donation, 36 clay butterflies, which today are produced in Mexico, as well as paint brushes, glaze, a page of explanation, and a Holocaust curriculum are sent to the institution, which then may paint and mount the butterflies as part of the project.

Or, if a teacher wants to buy the kit as an individual, he or she may do so for $72, says Rattner Price, explaining that the idea is not to make money on the commemorative materials, but to defray the cost of the materials.  Those who pay $180 enable the Butterfly Project to subsidize the lower cost for teacher.

Because the project started in San Diego, numerous institutions have butterflies imaginatively mounted on their walls or against painted backgrounds.  These institutions are both Jewish and non-Jewish.

There will be a lull in activities over the summer, but come September 7, an installation of butterflies will go up in the building on Murphy Canyon Road that houses the offices of the Jewish Federation of San Diego County and the Jewish Community Fouundation.  On October 4, there will be a screening of Not The Last Butterfly at the University of San Diego, followed on October 12 with a “Change Maker Festival” at which attendees will be invited under the auspices of Hillel to paint butterflies.  In January 2018, butterfly painting will be one of the features of a family day at the San Diego History Center, where one of the major exhibits focuses on the Jews of San Diego.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com