Courier News: Sapling from Anne Frank’s chestnut tree takes root at Raritan Valley Community College
Ethan Mannello
MyCentralJersey.com
BRANCHBURG – Raritan Valley Community College (RVCC) has dedicated the planting of a sapling from the original tree mentioned in Anne Frank’s Diary in honor of Anne Frank and the late Margit Feldman, co-founder of RVCC’s Holocaust institute and a survivor of the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.
The June 27 event featured speakers from the Anne Frank Center USA, Margit Feldman’s family, and the Jewish Federation of West-Central New Jersey as well as RVCC President Michael J. McDonough.
The sapling, planted near the Christine Todd Whitman Science Center, was grown from the horse chestnut tree behind Anne Frank’s secret annex in Amsterdam. Her family spent more than two years hiding there from the Nazis.
Frank often wrote about the tree in her diary, looking out the window of the annex.
“As long as this exists,” she wrote in her diary, “how can I be sad?”
The college also dedicated a bench next to the sapling to Feldman who passed away in April 2020. Feldman was born on the same date as Anne Frank, June 12, 1929.
Just a month later, RVCC applied for a sapling from the Anne Frank Sapling Project.
RVCC was then chosen by the Anne Frank Center USA as one of only six new recipients of a sapling.
The planting was supported by RVCC’s Institute of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, a collaboration between RVCC and the Jewish Federation of West-Central New Jersey.
“Raritan Valley Community College is incredibly honored to receive the sapling, a gift of the Anne Frank Center USA, and to remember Margit Feldman and recognize her work for the Institute of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The ceremony at RVCC focusing on these two remarkable individuals inspires everyone to envision a better world, free from discrimination, where everyone feels safe, welcome, and respected,” McDonough said.
The Sapling Project began in 2009 with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam’s efforts to preserve the original chestnut tree by gathering and germinating chestnuts and donating the saplings to organizations dedicated to Anne Frank’s memory.
Despite efforts to strengthen the original chestnut tree, the aged, diseased tree toppled in a windstorm in 2010.
In the last decade, the Anne Frank Center USA has awarded saplings to sites across the United States, including the U.S. Capitol and the United Nations Headquarters.
