Teen raises thousands for Holocaust center

Lindsey Dubb is just your average 16-year-old high school girl, who just raised $11,100 to support a Holocaust center.
When Dubb, a student at Jericho High School on Long Island paid a visit to the campus of Queensborough Community College about a year ago, she visited the Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center & Archive and was emotionally moved.
“They were working out of the basement in the Library Building,” the plucky junior said. “I thought about my aunt Bella, who was taken by the Nazis when she was 15 and thrown into the camps,” Dubb recalled.
Motivated by the idea that her aunt was in Auschwitz at the same age then as Dubb is now, she felt the need to do something. Then, a news report set her off.
“A while ago, I heard about some kids who vandalized a Jewish graveyard,” she said with a trace of sadness.
“Then I remembered what they said at the Kupferberg Center about how the Holocaust began with acts of vandalism,” Dubb said, speaking of Kristallnacht, when gangs broke the windows of Jewish-owned stores in Germany.
Dubb, a member of the National Honor Society and her school’s Latin and Spanish honor societies, embarked on a letter writing campaign to businesses in Nassau and Suffolk counties, family members and friends, starting in late September.
Within a few weeks contributions started showing up in her mailbox, and kept coming through January. “I thought it would be difficult to get contributions - it was a learning experience to see how generous people could be,” Dubb said.
“What was surprising was that the most generous contributions came from people who weren’t Jewish,” she marveled. “It’s important to remember that everyone’s the same, regardless,” she said.
Dubb regrets that she never got to meet co-founder Harriet Kupferberg, who passed away in January. “I met one of her daughters. She was wonderful,” she said. As for her own efforts, she downplays them. “It was only two or three weeks of work. If I didn’t get a response, I sent another letter. Almost everyone sent in something, even if it took two or three letters,” she recalled.
Arthur Flug, the executive director of the Kupferberg Center, was nearly speechless when he received the stack of checks on January 11, from a kid not even old enough to attend college.
When asked about his youngest benefactor, Flug answered the question with a question that said it all: “Isn’t she amazing?”