Teaching our children is a core value of our Jewish tradition. At our seders just two weeks ago, we fulfilled the mitzvah of v’higadata l’bincha — telling the Exodus story to our children. And the Shema prayer, the most basic declaration of our faith, includes the instruction: v’limadtem otam et b’neichem — and you shall teach the Torah to your children.

But some things are harder to teach than others, especially when it comes to the Shoah.

Today, 70 years after the liberation of the camps, we are at a crossroads. Most of us have had a direct link to survivors, and the memories and lessons of the Shoah are instilled deeply within us. But to younger generations, and especially to those not yet born, what was so close to us will seem the stuff of history — long ago and far away.

As a community and a people, we must look for ways to keep the stories of the Shoah alive, to bear witness for those who can’t, and to teach the history and lessons of the Holocaust to the next generation in ways that powerfully resonate.

That’s why UJA-Federation is proud to be the primary funder of Witness Theater, an intense yearlong project in which high school students meet regularly with Holocaust survivors and then create a play in which the students act out the survivors’ experiences.

Witness Theater was begun in Israel and brought to New York by Selfhelp Community Services, a UJA-Federation beneficiary agency and the largest provider of services to Holocaust survivors. On Wednesday evening, commemorating Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), I attended a performance of Witness Theater, along with more than 2,000 other people who saw performances at three different venues featuring high school students from Heschel, SAR, Trinity High School, and Yeshivah of Flatbush.

Witness Theater is deeply beneficial to both those telling their stories and those carrying them forward. For the students, it’s about connecting to the stories in a way that transcends anything that can be taught in the classroom or learned attending a memorial service. For the survivors, it’s about confronting their past and finding some measure of peace in knowing that what they lived through will not be forgotten. More fundamentally, for both, it’s about forging strong generational connections that will endure well beyond the performance. And someday, the students will teach these stories to their own children and to others — carrying the stories forward into new generations.

With the passage of time, how we remember will change, but the need to remember never will.

Shabbat shalom