Rahway High School’s Debra Maller was recently awarded the Margit Feldman Teaching Award, established by the Feldman family and the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education to honor of Margit Feldman, a survivor of the Holocaust who taught children about her experience for over 30 years and educated students about the importance of being an “upstander” who doesn’t let the bully prevail. Maller’s award was presented on June 11 at the New Jersey State Department of Education. Magrit Feldman was the first survivor of the Holocaust to speak at Rahway High School in 2001.
On March 21, Ms. Maller was also recognized at Kean University on March 21 as Outstanding Human Rights Educator. This award honors the valuable contributions she has made to increase awareness and advancement of human rights. She was presented with this award during the seventh annual Human Rights Conference, “Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding Lives and Communities Postwar.”
When Maller was young, she met a man whose effect on her was significant to her continued learning about genocide. She says, “He was staring at me, and I got very nervous. Then he started to cry,” she said. “He told us he was Jewish and that I reminded him of his sister who was killed during the Holocaust. It taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten: never to judge a person on their appearance.”
Debra has completed the Kean University certification course in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and spent several summers studying in Germany, Poland, and in Israel at the museum of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem. Maller created her school’s course on the literature of the Holocaust and genocides. This past year she brought Allan Farkas, a survivor of the Holocaust to meet her students and has Skyped in class with survivor Peter Feigl. She also serves on the executive board of the university’s Diversity Council. She co-sponsors the school’s Multi-Ethnic Culture Club (MECC), which annually visits the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and has raised over $ 1,000 for solar stoves and schools for Sudanese refugees from genocide in Chad. This summer Maller will again travel and learn about genocide, this time to China where she will study the Nanking genocide and meet with “Comfort Women” survivors from World War II.
(pictured) Debra Maller, who received the Magrit Feldman Teaching Award with Julie Feldman, Magrit Feldman, and David C. Hespe, Acting Commissioner of Education for the State of New Jersey.
