Peg Hodapp at work in the classroom at DeLaSalle High School in Minneapolis. DAVE HRBACEK | THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT
A Holocaust survivor named Murray Brandys shared his experiences at a Social Justice Awareness Week 18 years ago at DeLaSalle High School in Minneapolis.
Invited by Peg Hodapp, campus minister, the now-late survivor told the students he lived through a death march forced by the Nazis in World War II. Suddenly pulled aside to be shot and killed, he was inspired to sing. The guards inexplicably brought Brandys back into the march. They allowed him to live.
At Hodapp’s urging, Brandys went beyond telling his story. He taught the school choir a song to sing with him. Hodapp remembers it well. “Not a dry eye in the audience,” she said.
Some students also purchased his book: “My name was No. 133909 … and I sang.”
Peg Hodapp
That kind of going beyond the curriculum to touch student’s hearts and minds about the Holocaust, in hopes people will make the world a place where 6 million Jews and millions of others cannot be treated as less than human and killed, is what earned Hodapp recognition this year — April 8 — from the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas. The JCRC honored Hodapp with its annual Leo Weiss Courage to Teach Award. Since 2011, the award has gone to one teacher or school in the tri-state area.
“I am deeply, deeply honored and humbled by this recognition,” Hodapp, 55, told The Catholic Spirit. “I believe so strongly that our young people must be keenly aware of this atrocity in world history as well as many other horrific injustices that have blemished our humanity. They will forge a new path to the future.”
Nominated by her principal, Jim Benson, Hodapp was congratulated by Archbishop Bernard Hebda in a video made for the presentation during JCRC’s virtual Yom HaShoah Commemoration (Holocaust Remembrance Day). The archbishop said, “It’s hard to imagine a more concrete application of ‘Nostra aetate,’ the groundbreaking document from Vatican II that has led our Church to grapple with anti-Semitism and to look for opportunities for greater collaboration with the Jewish community.”
Susie Greenberg, an associate director at JCRC, told The Catholic Spirit about Brandys’ singing at DeLaSalle as she explained that Hodapp’s efforts have included working with the council to bring Holocaust survivors and their relatives into the school.
Now teaching theology, Hodapp includes a section on the Holocaust as part of a course for juniors titled Faith and Society, in a unit on Race, Racism, Stereotypes and Prejudices. Hodapp said including the Holocaust stems from her concerns over the last 20 years that the experiences and lessons of that atrocity could be lost as survivors pass away.
A teacher and campus minister for 28 years at DeLaSalle, Hodapp said she works to raise awareness about many forms of inequity and injustice, including gender, disability, religious and ethnic. In 1998 she began DeLaSalle’s Diversity and Inclusion Week and in 2000 instituted the school’s Starry Night Prom for people in the broader community living with disabilities. Both those initiatives and the school’s Social Justice Awareness Week, started by Hodapp in 2001, continue to this day.
In a school with a diverse population that includes Blacks, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans, students recently have been discussing the May 25 police-custody death on a Minneapolis street of George Floyd, an African American, and the subsequent protests and riots, as well as the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol and the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Hodapp said.
Sometimes she holds healing circles, framing open-ended questions and allowing everyone to speak if they want to. “To me, it’s important to give the space” to share, Hodapp said.
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