The Butterfly Project

Location

Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, Theatre

Free

Join us for a powerful call to action through the arts, using the lessons of the Holocaust, to discuss the dangers of hatred and bigotry. Led by Cheryl Rattner Price, co-founder and executive director of The Butterfly Project, this timely event will include:

• A special viewing of NOT The Last Butterfly, an award-winning documentary about The Butterfly Project, still in film festivals. 
• A brief description of The Butterfly Project and discussion.
• An opportunity for participants to be part of a world-wide effort to remember and memorialize the 1.5 million children who perished in the Holocaust. Each participant will paint a ceramic butterfly, and, together, we will create a work of art to symbolize that we each have a voice and need to be responsible to stand up to injustice.

The event will be held on Wednesday, October 4, 5:30-7:30 p.m., in the Kroc IPJ building's Peace and Justice Theatre.

This event is co-sponsored by the University of San Diego College of Arts and Sciences, University Ministry, The Jewish Student Union, Hillel of San Diego, the Humanities Center, the Changemaker Hub, The Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice and School of Leadership and Education Sciences. 

Film

NOT The Last Butterfly tells the inspiring tale of The Butterfly Project, a grass roots San Diego arts and education initiative that memorializes the 1.5 million children killed in the Holocaust through global displays of ceramic butterflies… one butterfly painted for each child.  The Butterfly Project’s messages of hope and healing are woven together with survivors’ courageous stories of these dark times, including a little-known story of the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, where a young Ela Weissberger was imprisoned as a child.  Now a survivor in her eighties, Ela reveals how she and other children were given the strength to endure the Holocaust by an artist and teacher who helped them express the trauma of their experiences through art. Both a moving account of survival and a lesson in the healing power of art working its magic again, NOT The Last Butterfly offers young and old alike a new way to find hope in one of history’s great tragedies and empowers all of us to take action to create a more peaceful world. 

Project

The Butterfly Project’s is a global education and arts program whose mission is to paint and display 1.5 million ceramic butterflies to honor and remember each child killed in the Holocaust, and to foster education and awareness of the dangers of hate and bigotry, by mobilizing the global community to stand up against injustice and create a more compassionate and peaceful world. The project was co-founded in 2006 in San Diego by educator Jan Landau and artist Cheryl Rattner Price as an initiative to take Holocaust education out of the textbook and bring it to life in a way that inspires students to make the world a better place. As of 2016, installations totaling nearly 150,000 butterflies have been created in communities of all faiths across the United States and in such diverse countries as Israel, Mexico, Poland, Australia, Czech Republic, Canada and Argentina.