One day after school I walked into an office building in midtown Manhattan feeling a mix of nervousness and excitement. I was there to meet other high school students and older adults at the nonprofit Selfhelp Community Services . I heard about Selfhelp’s Witness Theater program from my sister so I knew that the older adults we would be working with are not ordinary New Yorkers – they are all Holocaust survivors.

We are living in a time of an alarming rise in antisemitism, coinciding with the loss of the last generation of Holocaust survivors. As a Jewish New Yorker, I feel the weight and urgency of connecting with survivors to learn from them and understand their experiences.

The Witness Theater meetings were awkward at first. The students, all high school students like me, and the ad

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