Students seek 13 million pennies to honor Holocaust vicitms
The Associated Press
Published: January 1, 2007

AKRON, Ohio: Students in a Hebrew class are hoping to collect 13 million pennies — one for each person killed in the Holocaust.

Laura Hood, who teaches the class at Temple Israel, told the Akron Beacon Journal that the project will help students grasp the Holocaust’s. The 14 students have collected 65,000 pennies so far and are seeking donations from residents citywide.

“I want anyone who donates to hold a handful of pennies and imagine that they are holding the terrified hands of the humans who were marched into the gas chambers,” Hood told the newspaper.

Money raised in the effort will be donated to Temple Israel, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.

The project was inspired by a Tennessee school that set out in 1998 to collect 6 million paper clips — representing each Jew who died in the Holocaust — and received several times that number.
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The Tennessee students collected paper clips because they discovered that paper clips were invented by Norwegians, who wore them on their lapels as a silent protest against Nazi occupation during World War II.
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