This Month's Bar/Bat Mitzvah Story

Way back in second grade, Eva Rest started learning about the Holocaust. Then in 4th grade, she got the idea to collect one and a half million pennies, one for each of the 1.5 million children who were killed in the Holocaust. Back then, she collected 700 pennies.

In 6th grade, she took her collecting public, announcing her project at school on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. By 8th grade, she was up to 40,000 pennies!

“I had always planned to do something to commemorate the Holocaust as part of my bat mitzvah,” she said. So, for that occasion, she announced her “A Penny 4 A Life” project, and asked people to give her pennies for presents. The result? “A ton of pennies!” Eva said.

To be more exact, she doubled her total… to an amazing 80,000 pennies! People even gave her pennies in “bricks,” which is a brick-shape clump of 2,500 pennies worth $25.

To count them all, she took them to the MidAmerica National Bank, which was so impressed at her project, they gave Eva another $20… in pennies!

Along the way, Eva has collected pennies at her school, her congregation, family and friends. She has had a lot of help and encouragement from the her synagogue, Congregation Beth Shalom of Naperville, and the Illinois Holocaust Memorial Museum. When she reaches her goal, she plans on giving the pennies to her congregation, then the museum, to display.

For now, they are “on display” in her garage… in jars, boxes, and crates full of pennies in rolls, bricks, and just plain loose.

The day of her bat mitzvah, this past February, Eva read her Torah portion and her haftarah, led services, and gave a dvar Torah about tolerance.

But she also shared her special day by “twinning.” This is a way to share a bar or bat mitzvah with kids who can’t have one of their own for some reason, maybe because they live in a country that doesn’t allow Jews to do that.

In Eva’s case, she twinned with Eva Mueller, who was killed in Holocaust. “I thought it was extra-special that we shared a name,” Eva says. Eva Mueller, who lived in a country once called Yugoslavia, was only 8 years old when she died at the Auschwitz concentration camp. In honor of the bat mitzvah she could never have, Eva made a tallit and draped it over an empty chair at her bat mitzvah ceremony.

For Eva, commemorating the Holocaust is not only something for herself. Although she goes to junior high in Lisle now, Eva worked with her old grade school in Naperville, where she lives, to create a Holocaust education program for their students. She even helped teach it!

By the way, 1.5 million pennies equals $15,000. But Eva’s pennies are truly priceless.

JUF provides assistance and services to Holocaust survivors in Chicago and worldwide, and also works to promote the lessons and memory of the Holocaust.