Mark Schonwetter was a young Jewish boy in Poland when the Nazis came for his family. He survived, along with his mother, Sala, and his sister, Zosia, through three years of hiding in forests, attics, and the barns of families brave enough to risk everything to shelter them. One night during that stretch, the three of them walked fifteen miles straight through darkness to escape capture, a distance that would eventually become the literal measurement of the foundation’s flagship fundraiser decades later. Mark arrived in the United States in 1957 with five dollars to his name, built a genuine career in jewelry manufacturing from nothing, and in 2025 received a Civic Courage Award recognizing a lifetime shaped by that survival.

The foundation exists because his daughters, Ann Arnold and Isabella Fiske, grew up hearing those stories directly from their father and decided the history couldn’t stay confined to family dinner table conversations. They partnered with Mark to formally launch the Mark Schonwetter Holocaust Education Foundation in late 2019, based in Livingston, New Jersey, with a mission built around a genuinely practical problem. Plenty of states legally require Holocaust education in schools. Almost none of them actually fund it.

That gap is the entire reason MSHEF exists, and it’s worth sitting with for a second because it’s a genuinely absurd policy failure hiding in plain sight. A state can pass a law requiring every middle and high school to teach the Holocaust, check a box that says the mandate is fulfilled, and never allocate a single dollar to help teachers actually pull it off. Books cost money. Museum field trips cost money. Bringing an actual Holocaust survivor into a classroom to speak, arguably the single most powerful teaching tool available while survivors are still living to do it, costs money too. MSHEF steps directly into that funding vacuum, providing grants of up to $1,000 per educator specifically to cover those costs, and it does so across public, private, and Catholic schools alike, wherever the mandate exists without the money to back it up.

The foundation’s flagship fundraiser, Journey for the Living, asks participants nationwide to walk, run, or ride fifteen miles sometime during the month of May, directly commemorating the distance Mark, his mother, and his sister covered fleeing capture during the war. This year’s challenge raised more than $180,000, enough to fund grants for roughly 240 schools across the country. That’s not an abstract number. It’s 240 individual classrooms where a teacher who wanted to do this history justice, but couldn’t afford to, now can.

Here’s my honest take on why this foundation deserves more attention than a routine grant announcement usually gets. Holocaust survivors are, by the simple math of time, a rapidly shrinking population, and every year that passes without adequately funding this education is a year closer to losing the ability to teach it through firsthand testimony at all. A foundation built directly by a survivor’s own family, funded through a fifteen-mile walk that literally retraces his escape, and aimed squarely at the exact funding gap that keeps mandated curriculum from actually reaching students, isn’t chasing an abstract cause. It’s closing a very specific, very fixable hole in how this country keeps a promise it already legally made to teach this history. If you’re a teacher anywhere in the country facing that exact gap, the application window is open right now, and it’s worth using.