Through the sponsorship of Dartmouth College's William Jewett Tucker Foundation and Dartmouth Hillel, 12 students and 4 staff members traveled halfway across the world to a tiny community to repair that which had been desecrated nearly sixty years ago. The purpose of the trip was to restore a Jewish cemetery in Sopotskin, Belarus.
Sopotskin is a small village that used to be inhabited by 7,000 people before the war, many of those, Jews. Today, sitting 5 kilometers from both the Polish and Lithuanian border, Sopotskin is a small community of only 2,000. The experience began in Poland where the group set the tone of the trip by visiting the death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Thereafter, everyone traveled into Belarus, into the small village of Sopotskin to begin their work.
Many individuals interacted with an extremely hospitable community that welcomed the Americans into its closely-knit infrastructure with open arms and warm hearts. The experience was a structured trip through Dartmouth College's Tucker Foundation, which is intended to focus on a variety of aspects.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~hillel/belarus/ccesp.html
