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Given that the township's mayor makes sure to attend each year, and that Temple B'nai Shalom even had to turn away three churches for the latest trip, the Daniel Pearl Education Center's journey to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is becoming a popular interfaith tradition in East Brunswick.

On Jan. 18, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 90 students from B'nai Shalom, East Brunswick Jewish Center, B'nai B'rith Youth Organization (BBYO), and East Brunswick's St. Bartholomew School were among the 110 people on the fifth annual Washington, D.C. trip for B'nai Shalom's Pearl Center, named for the Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter killed in 2002 by terrorists in Pakistan.

For both Jewish and non-Jewish participants grades 7-11, the trip's goal is to teach tolerance and understanding, two of Pearl's ideals during his career, by showing that the Holocaust "is not just a Jewish thing," said Dr. Andy Boyarsky, chairman of the Pearl Center's committee.

"It's really the message of this building, I think," Boyarsky told The Jewish State at the Holocaust museum.

East Brunswick Mayor David Stahl, a member of B'nai Shalom, said he has missed only one of the center's Washington trips in the program's five years. Religious tolerance is a high priority for a township that has synagogues, churches, Iqra Community Services for the Islamic population, and a Korean church, Stahl said.

Stahl said he and Ed Luster, East Brunswick Township Council president, didn't enter the trip with a Jewish perspective, but rather with the responsibility of representing their township's diverse community. Just two days earlier, Stahl attended a memorial service at Saint Mary Coptic Orthodox Church in East Brunswick for a group of Coptic Christians who were recently killed in Egypt as they left evening mass.

"I think the [Pearl] center does a great job in bringing all these issues out into the forefront," Stahl said of tolerance and understanding.

On the bus ride to the museum, Boyarsky told the students that "we are not going to see a religious shrine today," because besides for 6 million Jews, the Nazis also exterminated gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled during the Holocaust. Boyarsky said the Pearl Center's "joy today comes from taking such a diverse group to the museum"; Pearl also valued diversity as a journalist, he explained.

"He was non-judgmental," Boyarsky said. "He let his readers make up their own minds."

Upon entering the museum, students were handed an identification card with the life story of a Holocaust survivor, and another card that requested "As you go through the exhibition, which photograph or artifact has special meaning for you?"

Before the students entered the exhibit, Rabbi Eric Milgrim asked them to think about themselves as someone who lost a loved one during the Holocaust "so that you can feel emotionally that which we are learning historically," besides for envisioning themselves as the person on the identification cards.

Milgrim said the most important concept to keep in mind during the experience was mutual respect.

"First and foremost, each of us are children of God," Milgrim said.

The museum tells how the atrocities of the Holocaust happened, not why, tour guide Arthur Anderson told the group. Of the 500 different survivors listed on the identification cards, 30 currently work for the museum, he said. Anderson stressed that survivors still remember the events of the Holocaust "as if they were yesterday."

"It isn't old stuff or ancient history," Anderson said.

Eric Wolf of East Brunswick, who came on the trip with BBYO, said "I wasn't in touch with my Judaic side" when he took the Pearl Center's inaugural Washington trip as an 8th grader, but now that he's 17 and more connected with religion, he spent a lot more time going through the exhibit.

Also part of BBYO, 15-year-old Ryan Kalt of East Brunswick noted the powerful silence of the museum's "Hall of Remembrance" rotunda room, a memorial with names of concentration camps on the walls and a large flame above an area with dirt from both camps and the cemeteries of American soldiers who died in the effort to liberate camps.

"It was the first time on the trip that I took a moment to think about how serious it was," Kalt said.

Stahl's 11-year-old daughter, Shoshana, said she is reading the "Diary of Anne Frank" to learn about the Holocaust on her own time, and that the museum's section on Frank added to her understanding with pictures of how Frank lived and went to school. "It's two completely different points of view," she said.

Luster said the museum reminds Jews and non-Jews alike never to repeat history by dispelling notions that the Holocaust never happened. His 16-year-old son, Josh, noted that despite the horrors of the Holocaust, subsequent genocides have still taken place in Bosnia, Rwanda, and currently in Darfur.

"Despite the fact that we say 'never again,' how many times has it happened?" Josh said.

St. Bartholomew student Joanna Braudigan said that before seeing the museum, she "didn't realize how bad the Holocaust was."

Fellow 8th grader Julia Abboud said seeing pictures of European families made her "realize they had a life before the Holocaust."

After the museum, the group visited the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall. At the Vietnam memorial, Irwin Steinwess, a member of Jewish War Veterans in Middlesex County, spoke to the students about the war, during which he was a radio and teletype operator.

Steinwess said he was 20 years old when he was sent to Vietnam, and since it was such a long war, he didn't fully understand exactly why he was there.

"Today, the kids are much more sophisticated, the parents are much more sophisticated," Steinweiss said.

Besides for the trip to Washington, the Pearl Center participates in Daniel Pearl World Music Days, an international network of concerts in his memory; brings special speakers to B'nai Shalom; and gives scholarships to high school students in East Brunswick who aren't affiliated with the synagogue, Boyarsky said.

Judging by how the center couldn't accommodate every organization that wanted to send students on the trip this year, Boyarsky said, "we really think that different youth groups and clergy have gotten the message [of the center] and want to participate."

The center looks at its programs "as if we are planting seeds," said Danny Gresack, another member of the center's committee. Perhaps 10 years down the road, participants will say "Daniel Pearl is a part of my life," he said.

"What Daniel Pearl did, he would tell stories about people, and it brought [the stories] alive," Gresack said. "That built the bridges between different kinds of people."