Heritage seekers

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ten students who live in Newport Beach departed Monday for a tour of Poland and Israel with Tarbut V’Torah Community Day School. Over the coming weeks, several of them plan to e-mail impressions of their trip to the Daily Pilot.

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IRVINE — Erica Shapiro can barely remember her Holocaust survivor cousin, the one with the serial number branded on her arm. She saw the distant relative only once at a family function years ago when she was a toddler.

On Monday, Erica boarded a bus outside Tarbut V’Torah Community Day School and headed off for a second — and much longer — look at her people’s history. The Newport Beach resident joined most of her 11th-grade class on a three-week trip to Poland and Israel, where the students planned to visit the grounds of the Nazi concentration camps and tour other historic sites.

“I live in Orange County and I’m really fortunate,” Erica, 17, said. “I don’t have to go outside and worry about a terrorist attack. I don’t have to deal with a lot of anti-Semitism. But when you go to Poland, there’s so much history and so many people who have suffered.”

As Erica and four dozen of her classmates — including 10 Newport Beach residents — gathered outside the school to say goodbye to family members, a bus waited by the curb with a banner on the side reading “Israel/Poland.” Lou Weiss, the president of the school’s board of directors, led the students in a group prayer and a rendition of the traditional hymn “Oseh Shalom.”

The Irvine private school sponsors the 11th-grade trip every year, with students’ families paying their way and others going through financial aid. On the docket for the next 19 days, Tarbut V’Torah security director Shalom Shalev said, were a week in Poland followed by visits to Jerusalem, Galilee, the Red Sea and other locations. Ten students planned to stay an additional two weeks in Israel to repair schools and do other charity work.

“The bottom line is to have them realize that their heritage and their history is something that should be carried with pride,” Shalev said.

Carter Greenbaum, who departed for the trip along with his sister, Lea, felt a rush of emotions as he prepared to board the bus to the airport. He had only been outside the country once, he said, at an international student conference last year in Russia.

“I’m excited for Israel because I’ve never been there,” Carter, 16, said. “All my friends who have gone there say it’s a life-changing experience.”