Each year, Yiddishkayt selects 36 students for a summer of intensive exploration of Jewish history, culture, and heritage. Led by advanced graduate students who study and teach a wide-range of topics in Jewish history and culture, the project provides students with a series of innovative educational experiences first at Yiddishkayt’s headquarters in Los Angeles, followed by the core part of the program — an adventure to the historical heartlands of Jewish life abroad. Based on students’ genealogical research into their families’ histories, students are divided into three groups of 12 that travel to the areas in Central and Eastern Europe that their forbears called home for centuries prior to their immigration to America and before the destruction of European Jewish life in the Holocaust. After the trip, Helixers return to Los Angeles for a full debriefing about their collective experiences in Europe and for workshops exploring the past, present, and future of Jewish culture and identity.

The overwhelming success of Holocaust education over the past two decades has amplified a serious absence — students know about the loss, but not what was lost. Young Jews (and non-Jews) throughout America learn quite a lot about the obliteration of European Jewry during the Second World War: they learn about the murderous ideology of Nazism, about the stripping of the basic rights of Jews before the final solution, and more than anything else, they study the mechanisms of torture and murder that annihilated 6 million Jews. Most Jewish students enter colleges and universities able to name more Nazi leaders than they can name major Jewish writers and more sites of mass slaughter than cities that once flourished with nearly majority Jewish populations.

Currently, more courses at major colleges and universities throughout North America teach about the destruction of European Jewish culture than about the culture that was destroyed. As a result, young Jews (as well as many older ones) see the experience of Jews in Europe as a never-ending history of constant despair and sadness. Yiddishkayt sees this situation—so far from the truth of actual, lived experience—as a tragedy.

Seventy years after the murder of so many Jewish lives, the Holocaust now continues to obliterate any memory of the richness of Jewish life throughout the world. The Helix actively fights against this erasure by allowing young Jews to witness first-hand just how alive Jewish life once was by exploring the landscapes Jews called home and the cultural treasures they produced there. The voices of great Jewish authors and poets resound once more when Helixers visit the cities and towns these authors called home, read their works, and trace their footsteps through the sites described in their masterpieces of Yiddish, Russian, and Polish creativity. Yiddishkayt shows a richer, more pluralistic, more remarkable Jewish life than ever imagined.