Photo by Jason Harris courtesy The Steward School
Ryan Burgess watches as the students in her 10th grade English class at The Steward School paint small ceramic butterflies. Provided by the Virginia Holocaust Museum on East Cary Street in Richmond, the ceramic figures are part of The Butterfly Project, a global education, arts and memorial-making initiative to remember the 1.5 million children killed during the Holocaust.
“The students really appreciate the chance to pause and reflect on the people’s stories,” Burgess says. “They have been talking to each other about the individual lives of the children and what they went through while they are painting.”
The hands-on experience gives students the chance to slow down and thoughtfully decorate the butterflies with colors that reflect their feelings during the process. “They thanked me,” Burgess says. “They really appreciated being able to connect to the stories on the [biographical] cards.”
The Steward School, a private JK-12 institution in Henrico County, is one of many schools in Virginia and North Carolina that are collectively painting 9,000 ceramic butterflies for installation at the Virginia Holocaust Museum. Schools receive kits containing unpainted butterflies, paintbrushes, colored glaze and biographical cards, each with information about a child who died in the Holocaust. Students paint the butterflies, which are then returned to the museum to be fired in a kiln and added to a new commemorative mural in the museum’s reception area.
Photo by Jason Harris courtesy The Steward School
The Butterfly Project was co-founded in San Diego in 2006 by Jan Landau and Cheryl Rattner Price. Landau had seen a documentary, “Paper Clips,” about a middle school in Whitwell, Tennessee, where the mostly white, Christian students were inspired by a Holocaust education class to create a memorial on school grounds, learning about tolerance and diversity along the way.
“They were my motivation to make sure the school where I taught and that my son attended — the San Diego Jewish Academy — would also have a Holocaust memorial,” Landau says. “I wanted the memorial to be a reminder of what happened during the Holocaust, but I didn’t want it to be something that would create fear and sadness.”
Landau remembered a poem she had read as a girl, “The Butterfly” by Pavel Friedmann, a young Jewish man who was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp. “He spoke about not seeing a butterfly when he was in a ghetto. His poem made me think about what a butterfly symbolizes: hope, freedom, beauty and the fragility of life,” Landau says. “Just like a butterfly’s, our lives are fragile, and the way people treat us can stay with us forever, so it is so very important that we treat each other with kindness.”
To make the butterflies, Landau partnered with Price, a fellow parent and ceramic artist. They agreed that ceramic was a suitable material for creating a memorial and bringing dignity and meaning to the memory of the children. “It goes through fire and comes out renewed and transformed — a powerful symbol of remembrance and hope,” Price says.
From that inspiration, The Butterfly Project has grown to over 380,000 butterflies in permanent memorial installations in all 50 U.S. states and 25 countries. More than 200 organizations are participating worldwide, and there are butterflies on all seven continents, including Antarctica. The goal is to collectively reach a count of 1.5 million butterflies.
“It’s an amazing project,” says Sam Asher, president and executive director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum, which joined the initiative in 2023. The museum’s education team reached out to schools in Virginia and North Carolina that had visited the museum and invited them to participate; just over 9,000 butterflies were requested.
Students from Great Bridge High School in Chesapeake place the first 300 butterflies on the Virginia Holocaust Museum’s new Henri Maizels Memorial Butterfly Garden mural. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Students from Great Bridge High School in Chesapeake traveled to the museum on April 3 to install the first 300 butterflies on the new Henri Maizels Memorial Butterfly Garden mural, which is dedicated to the memory of a Holocaust survivor and longtime Richmond resident who died in 2023.
“The butterflies will go in the front part of the museum shop, which is all glass. It will be gorgeous,” Asher says.
According to a report published by the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel, there was a 340% rise in global antisemitic incidents in 2024 compared to 2022.
“Learning the lessons of the Holocaust can hopefully prevent another one from happening to anyone, regardless of their religion, race, gender or sexual orientation. It is especially important to teach students the dangers of bullying, hatred, prejudice and indifference,” Landau says.
Burgess says studying the Holocaust is extremely important today. To prepare for their butterfly painting session, her students and those in colleague Trevor Smith’s English class read “The Butterfly”; the memoir “Night” by Elie Wiesel, based on the author’s experiences in Nazi Germany concentration camps; and “The Perils of Indifference,” a speech by Wiesel. “We also had students write papers on genocide,” Burgess says.
The students at Steward are “grateful to be part of a larger project that is so impactful in our area,” she adds. “This project connects the students with the idea of not being indifferent.”
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