January 27, 2013

(JTA) — Students at a school in  Bridgwater, England are working to collect 6.6 million burnt matchsticks to remember the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

The students at Chilton Trinity School had collected 66,000 matchsticks as of Jan. 25, three days before their target completion date of Jan. 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 

“Doing something like this is so powerful and emotional,” head of religious studies Tess Hurst told the Bridgwater Mercury. “Each burnt matchstick represents one person’s life who was killed.”

The students hope to display the matchsticks in a glass monument outside the school’s new building, which it has occupied since November 2012. A three-dimensional mockup of the 6.6 million matchstick sculpture is being produced by the school’s science department.

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