David Broide, 13, a student at Hillel Com-munity Day School in North Miami Beach, collected the pennies as a bar mitzvah project. Friends, relatives and classmates helped, and Broide gave $1,800 in bar mitzvah gifts to the project, too.
Passengers on Royal Caribbean cruises also contributed, dropping coins in cans at check-in counters at Port Everglades and the Port of Miami. A vice president of the cruise line, Craig Milan, is a board member of the Holocaust center.
David Broide sits with some of the 1.5 million pennies he collected. photo/ap/carey wagner, sun sentinelThe $15,000 in pennies — more than 6,000 pounds — were delivered by a Brinks truck to the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center in Hollywood, Fla., where they were collected in jugs, coin rolls and plastic bags.
Although the center is still deciding how best to use them, visitors are amazed at the sight, said Rositta Kenigs-berg, executive vice president.
“They always say something like, ‘So many pennies, so many children,’ “ said Kenigsberg, a child of a Holocaust survivor. “In all my years of Holocaust education, I’ve never met a young person who did this by himself.”
Broide started his project in the summer of 2009. He began it to commemorate his late grandfather Jose Broide, who fought Nazis in Poland as a partisan.
“He was a hero to me,” Broide said. “I think he’d be very proud of this. And I’m honored that so many people have contributed.”
Broide actually overshot his goal by 100,000 pennies. Now he’s planning another project: To collect 6 million pennies, one for every Jew killed in the Holocaust. — ap
