S.F. teen hugs a Palestinian and pens 1st-prize essay

Laurie Shikhman didn’t rescue 6,000 Jews from a deadly fate at the hands of Nazis.

But like the Righteous Diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who did, she has overcome religious and cultural barriers in order to do the right thing.

Shikhman, a junior at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco, hugged an Arab boy. In doing so, the Jewish student overcame her preconceived notions about Palestinians and hopefully changed his about Jews.

She recently won first prize in the third annual San Francisco Sugihara “Do the Right Thing” essay contest, (also held separately in New York and Boston), for her entry about this encounter. Coincidentally, Shikhman’s father is from Lithuania, where Sugihara served as Japanese consul during World War II.

The contest, which is sponsored locally by the Braun Holocaust Institute of the Anti-Defamation League in cooperation with the San Francisco Unified School District, is funded by the Eugene and Rose Kleiner Family Foundation.

Shikhman met the Arab boy last year while in Israel with a delegation of teens from the Bay Area and St. Louis. At one point during the two-week trip, the group visited students at the Palestinian-run high school Al Mutran, located just outside Jerusalem.

After the two groups participated in mixers, a discussion somehow cropped up about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Shikhman, the lone Jew in the group, was shocked to hear one Arab teen speak freely about his utter hatred toward Jews.

“If I could, I’d kill all Jews with my bare hands,” he announced to the group, asking if any of them had ever met a Jew.

“When he found out I was Jewish, he was embarrassed and he ran off,” recalled Shikhman, who had a realization of her own. “I suddenly realized that I was in Arab territory and became a bit freaked out and paranoid. I begged the supervisors to let us leave, but they insisted we were safe.”

When it was time to leave, however, Shikhman made an exceptional gesture toward the boy.

“I went up to him and we kind of looked at each other. We didn’t say anything, but we hugged,” she said. “Amazed at our response, we both smiled and silently understood that the conflicts between our cultures should not come between people.”

During an award ceremony and reception at San Francisco City Hall late last month, Shikhman received $1,500 and a roundtrip ticket to Japan. She and the first-prize winners from Boston and New York will fly in October to speak at high schools about “doing the right thing.”

Also in San Francisco, the second-place winner, junior Raymond Lee of Lowell High School received $1,000; the third place winner, junior An Qi He of Abraham Lincoln, received $500; and 10 honorable mentions each received $100.

Locally, 150 people entered and a panel of 55 judges chose the winners.

Contest founder Sylvia Smoller, herself a Sugihara survivor, was impressed by all of this year’s San Francisco entries, saying that Shikhman’s was particularly appealing because of the “one-on-one connection” made between the teens.

“She could have been offended, but instead she reached out,” Smoller said in a telephone interview from her residence in New York.

“Maybe the Arab boy she reached out to will suddenly have a different view of Jews and will reach out himself. The waves that will spread from this could really be quite important.”

Even Sugihara did not know that writing life-saving transit visas that helped at least 6,000 Jews to escape would eventually impact 40,000 descendants.

“What you do today might have an enormous impact on the future,” said Smoller, who chairs the contest’s national advisory board. “You just don’t know how many people it will influence.”

Smoller founded the contest after taking a trip to Japan to donate her passport to a Sugihara memorial there. At the memorial, she noticed a Japanese woman and her son, a boy of about 6, looking at some scattered photographs of Sugihara.

“I asked her why she brought such a young boy to the memorial,” said Smoller, who was 6 when Sugihara saved her family. “She told me that it was very important that her son have a hero to look up to.”

Smoller was so moved by the woman’s explanation that when she returned to the United States she decided “instead of just giving speeches about Sugihara I would find a way to encourage the young to follow in his footsteps.”

She first founded the contest in New York and it later expanded to Boston and San Francisco. It may eventually expand throughout the United States as well as to Japan.

“High school kids are pretty idealistic and really struggle with moral and ethical issues,” said Smoller. “And from what I’ve seen, they generally want to do the right thing.”

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