This past Saturday, I attended my high school’s homecoming dance. Prior to the dance, I took pictures with my friends, just like most other teenaged girls attending the dance. I thought we took the standard homecoming pictures; one person on each step, arms around each other, etc. However, I soon realized that other people had different ideas for their homecoming pictures.

When I got home that night, after taking off my makeup and changing into sweatpants and a sweatshirt, I began my nightly routine of checking social media. As I scrolled through the tweets on private Twitter (a section of Twitter where people only have private accounts, meaning they can control who sees what they tweet and who doesn’t), I noticed that a boy in my grade at school, who does not normally tweet pictures, tweeted a picture. I clicked on the picture to see what it was and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Four boys (all of whom I go to school with) were standing on steps of a staircase, each of them doing the Nazi salute. On the bottom of the picture, someone had photoshopped a Swastika; the picture was captioned “yeah, this is a thing.”

Never, in my whole life, had I been so disgusted, both as a Jewish-American and a person in general. I tried to speculate about what went through their minds as they took this picture. “Nobody is that ignorant,” I thought. It seemed impossible that they could not know how offensive that was. It seemed impossible, that is, until I thought about what Loudoun County Public Schools had taught them about the Holocaust. I’m sure they knew that 11 million people died, six million of them Jewish, but did they know what that meant? Did they know how they were being killed? Did they know how the lives of most of the people living in Europe were affected? No. Besides a short introduction in the seventh grade, they had not been taught very much about the Holocaust. I realized, to my dismay, that this was the fault of school district.

The two word phrase that is often associated with the Holocaust is “never again.” The common thought in Judaism is that if we learn about the Holocaust and mourn it, then we (as well as Jewish and non-Jewish people in power) will know how not to let it happen again. However, how can we insure that it will happen “never again” if we don’t know what happened in the first place? Schools need to teach about the Holocaust, not just from the Jewish standpoint, but from the point of view of the 5 million other people of minorities that suffered consequences of the Nazi party’s ruthless actions.

I have recently realized how much of a minority Judaism is. In the Jewish religion, there are two holidays that are more important than the rest, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. Typically, Jewish students do not go to school on these days so they can observe the holidays at Synagogue, however, the pressures of

high school make this very difficult. There are approximately two million Jews in NoVa (northern V.A.); Of those Jews, a good amount of them are teens who have to worry about missing school to fulfill their duties as a Jewish adult. Many of these students often face pressure from their teachers when they tell them that they will be missing school due to a religious holiday. In states such as Maryland and New York, schools have student holidays on these days, as well as for the Muslim holiday Eid Al-Adha. This needs to occur in Virginia. The first amendment to the constitution says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” While the government is not respecting an establishment of one religion, they are saying that the Jewish and Muslim holidays are not as important as other holidays, such as Christmas; schools are closed for Christmas, but not for Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, or Eid Al-Adha. This can be seen again in section one of the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” By not granting students the right to practice their religion without pressure from schools, school boards are not abiding by these amendments.