Project links teens, Soah victims

When 12-year-old Max Levin was looking for a meaningful way to celebrate his upcoming bar mitzvah in 2006, he embarked on a project in Israel that created a link between today’s teens and their peers who died in the Holocaust before ever reaching that special milestone. 

“I used to come to Israel every year with my parents, partly because of my dad’s work, but mostly because our family is very Zionistic,” said Max, today a 22-year-old paratrooper and officer in the Israel Defense Forces. Max’s father, Bud Levin, is Jewish National Fund (JNF) vice president.  

In 2006, when the Levin family came to Israel searching for a bar mitzvah project, they eventually honed in on the Golden Books of Honor that JNF keeps at its offices in Jerusalem. Max Levin recalled seeing those volumes that over the years have documented donations to JNF, and that by now contain more than 200,000 inscriptions.  

“One of these books contained the names of young people who, during the Holocaust, donated money in honor of their bar mitzvahs. When I asked my dad what happened to them, he told me they all died and that there’s nobody left to remember them. I was very moved and decided that for my project I would make sure that they were remembered,” said Levin, a Los Angeles native who made aliyah in 2012. 

To do this, he created the B’nai Mitzvah Remembrance Wall in American Independence Park, in the verdant Jerusalem hills near Beit Shemesh. The wall is shaped like a Torah scroll, and glass tiles representing donations to JNF are mounted on it, each inscribed with the individual name, hometown, and bar or bat mitzvah date of a modern-day honoree, as well as the name and home country of a “twin” from the Golden Book. Levin’s was the first tile, and he was twinned with Pinchas Cohen of Germany.  

“I had two goals in creating the wall. First, I wanted to remember Pinchas and to somehow continue the life that was taken from him. Second, I wanted kids looking for bar or bat mitzvah projects to do the same with other young Holocaust victims and in that way establish a link between them and those who perished,” Levin said.