EHS students pose with members of the Jewish Community Relations Council Student to Student program.

EDWARDSVILLE - The Edwardsville High School Drama Club and the Jewish Community Relations Council will co-host a panel discussion about the EHS fall play, “Letters to Sala.”

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At 3 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 26, 2025, community members are invited to the EHS auditorium for a conversation about the play and the collaboration between the Drama Club and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC). Last fall, EHS students met with their Jewish peers from the JCRC’s Student to Student program so EHS students could learn more about Judaism, the Holocaust and Jewish traditions.

“[Director] Ashley [Melton] and her students took all that information and incorporated it into their production,” explained Rachel Bray with JCRC. “But really, these students took it a step further and really absorbed the life lessons about connecting with people who don’t look like you, pray like you, believe the same things necessarily that you do, and how in life, sometimes that can really be a benefit to you and to the community that you are part of.”

In November 2024, the EHS Drama Club premiered “Letters to Sala,” a play about the Holocaust. Before the production, JCRC students came to EHS to share information about Judaism with the cast and crew, with the goal that Drama Club students could incorporate this information to deepen their performances and understanding of the play.

The panel discussion on Jan. 26 will allow EHS students and JCRC students to reconnect and share their experience with the community. EHS Drama Director Ashley Melton and JCRC Student to Student Director Lauren Abraham will also be available to answer questions about their collaboration.

Bray attended college with Melton. When Melton called her and asked for advice, Bray helped set up the conversation between EHS students and the JCRC’s Student to Student program. Bray noted that Melton was eager to help her students learn more about Judaism.

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“One thing that the director, Ashley Melton, really wanted to accomplish is that it wasn’t just about performing a script or a play or just reading words on a page,” Bray said. “It was also about getting to the heart of the production and the message behind it and also maybe learning a lesson that they can keep with them as they turn into young adults and so on and go on from high school.”

The Student to Student program often presents in classrooms, so working with the EHS Drama Club was an “extremely unique” experience, Bray said. Student to Student is a program of the Newmark Institute at JCRC. The program allows Jewish teenagers to talk with their peers about their lives and traditions, and students can ask questions to learn more about Judaism and Jewish history.

“They just talk about life as a Jewish teenager,” Bray explained. “When I was in high school, I was nowhere near as confident or as sure of my identity, for both sides, for the Student to Student presenters and Edwardsville’s teenagers. But both of these groups were so engaged with one another…They were just so in tune with what was being discussed, and then to actually put it into action through their play as well as just through their day-to-day, how they’re looking at the world now? It’s really one of the most inspiring things.”

Bray added that the “Letters to Sala” production was “ambitious,” but it had a deep effect on the Drama Club students. She said that Melton and her students “went the extra mile” with everything they did, and JCRC was happy to be a part of their preparations.

Bray, Melton and Abraham hope to see many community members at the panel discussion on Sunday, Jan. 26. Bray added that JCRC’s Student to Student program has been in operation for over 30 years, and they’re always looking for more opportunities to present.

“We know that it does help people of all backgrounds understand tolerance and differences and diversity and all of those things that are super important,” she said. “It really is about the broader community of just sharing a little bit about what Judaism is, but also the broader theme of, our world is not one race or one belief or one religion or anything like that. It really takes all of us having a little bit of understanding of one another.”