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While Jewish teenagers across the country tour Poland on programs like March of the Living and Heritage, students at Moshe Aaron Yeshiva High School explore the remnants of the Holocaust in perhaps an even more personal manner -- with their parents.

From Nov. 21-25, eight girls, six of their mothers, and two administrators at MAYHS went on the South River School's first Girls' Division mother-daughter trip to Poland, after the Boys' Division took their first father-son trip there last year. Melissa Rosen, the school's director of community relations, said that MAYHS plans to alternate student trips to Poland and Israel each year.

The group's memorable journey included the Warsaw and Krakow ghettos, the Pleszew forced labor camp, and the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps, among other stops. Participants agreed that going with family made the experience particularly emotional.

"I imagined all of the mothers, the daughters, the sons that were there and had to be separated, and having my daughter there made it that much more concrete and horrifying," said Rosen, who went as both an administrator and a parent, with her daughter Shira on the trip.

"It's so personal all of a sudden," she added.

Though her grandparents survived Auschwitz, student Zara Leibowitz of Manalapan never met them. On this trip, she visited the same workroom in the concentration camp where his grandmother had to remove jewelry from dead bodies.

"I'm sad I didn't know her," Leibowitz said.

Bat-Sheva Kaplan, Girls' Division principal, came to Poland with specific instructions on how to find the tombstones of her husband's grandfather and great-grandfather at a Jewish cemetery in Krakow, as no one from the family had visited in decades. At the cemetery, the students made it their mission to help Kaplan successfully find the graves.

"It was an extremely, extremely moving experience to be able to pray at those graves," Kaplan said. "It hit us all, it definitely hit a raw nerve in everybody."

The trip started in Warsaw, where the group saw a mass grave with 3,000 Jews, a children's memorial in honor of famous author and pediatrician Janusz Korczak, the final remaining piece of the Warsaw Ghetto wall, and the city's main synagogue, which is still active. Students learned of the resurgence of Jewish life in Warsaw, as locals are discovering that they are Jewish later in life.

In Pleszew, which was almost completely destroyed and now consists of just green fields and one monument, Shira Rosen recalled the group's shock as they saw Polish teenagers disrespecting the memorial by drinking beer there.

While touring Krakow, the group saw the synagogue of Rabbi Moses Isserles, the Ashkenazic commentator known as the Ramah, Oscar Schindler's factory, and the ghetto. Learning more about the Ramah was an example of how the trip not only concretized what the girls learned about the Holocaust in school, but also helped them gain new insights to make future connections in Jewish studies classes.

"He realized that all of a sudden, [the girls] were making connections they might not have made before," Rosen said of the tour guide at the Ramah synagogue.

After taking a train to Oswiecim, the Polish city that is home to Auschwitz, Dean of Students Rabbi Avraham Krawiec decided that instead of taking a bus to Auschwitz, the group should make the 15-minute walk within the city to the camp, in order to soak in the gloomy and ominous environment.

Student Brittany Seidman of Marlboro said she was awed by how large the concentration camps were, seeing that what she had learned in school about the Nazis' operation was true.

"Just to see where everything happened, it just makes it so real," student Esther Kaufman of Highland Park said.

"We all smelled ash still, 60 years later," Melissa Rosen said.

After an emotional six-hour tour of Auschwitz, the group prayed Minchah at the camp's one remaining gas chamber, an incomparable experience, they said.

"For most of us, it was one of the most powerful tefilot that we've ever davened in our lives," Kaplan said. "I found that when I was davening, all of the words of the shemoneh esrei took on new meaning."

Other students on the trip included Zahava Picado of Freehold, Sherry Goldstein of Manalapan, Sophie Schick of Highland Park, and Yael Lewitter of Elizabeth. At different sites in Poland, the girls gave speeches to the group. There was also time for some lighter activities, such as stopping in local malls at night to get a sense of local flavor in Poland.

Leibowitz even learned that her name, Zara, means "I'll be back" in Polish.

"On the buses, I just kept on seeing my name," she said.