LA Instagram star talks about Holocaust remembrance in Manhattan Beach

Montana Tucker has been told she doesn’t fit the bill of what a Jew is, in multiple ways, from her last name to her blonde hair.

But the 30-year-old, lifetime performer said she doesn’t let others’ doubts stop her from celebrating her Jewish culture. And now, she’s working to creatively instill in others a new pride in their Judaism.

Tucker — who’s originally from Boca Raton, Florida, but now lives in Los Angeles — has been acting, modeling, singing and dancing since she was 8 years old, and in recent years rose to social media fame through her dance videos on sites like TikTok and Instagram.

But amid the entertainment lifestyle, she also grew up hearing her grandparents’ stories of their experiences as Holocaust survivors.

She realized she had to use her influential platform to not just entertain people through song and dance, but also to educate folks on the Holocaust and Jewish culture.

“I knew I needed to do something bigger to honor them,” Tucker said.

Tucker created “How to: Never Forget — a Holocaust remembrance film,” a 10-part series of short videos documenting her time spent in Poland last year visiting Nazi-invaded sites, from which some of her Jewish ancestors never made it out.

This week, Tucker spoke about making that film and her ongoing work to preserve Jewish history to about 80 attendees at the Congregation Tikvat Jacob synagogue in Manhattan Beach. The presentation was timed in honor of Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, which took place April 17 and 18 this year. It’s always on the 27th day of Nisan, or spring, on the Hebrew calendar, which falls in April or May each year.

Rabbi Josh Kalev, of Manhattan Beach congregation, said he invited other synagogues and churches in the South Bay, middle and high schools and local group MB United to the Tuesday, April 25, event, which was not open to the general public.

Tucker and her team started publishing videos from the remembrance series on TikTok and other social media sites in November, coincidentally around the time rapper Kanye West publicly expressed anti-Semitic comments.

That coincidence, though, felt like divine intervention on the part of her late grandfather, who she calls by the Yiddish word Zaide.

“I thought I was going to get a lot of negative comments (about the film), but I didn’t care,” Tucker said. “I wanted to honor my family, my grandparents and Jewish people; hopefully this series inspires people to speak out and be proud of who they are.”

Audience members dabbed away their tears as they watched a scene from the series where Tucker visited the Belzec extermination camp, standing above a gravesite of 500,000 bodies and viewing photos of Jews being tortured at the hands of smiling Nazi soldiers.

Standing at those traumatic sites, Tucker said, she “had the horrible realization that I lost more than just my great-grandparents in the Holocaust, but so many relatives I’ll never get to know or love.”

Tucker’s grandmother was 13 years old when she was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp with her mother, Tucker’s great-grandmother. The young girl watched her mother get beaten, taken to the gas chamber line and dragged to her final fate.

Standing in that place, Tucker said, was heart-wrenching — but not defeating.

“I also felt it was empowering to be there,” she said, “because the Nazis thought no Jew would make it out alive.”

Tucker said a new pride was instilled in the Jewish people who had watched her film. She got daily messages from folks saying they were afraid to be Jewish, or wear their star of David necklaces at school — now they’re proud to wear it.

“What the viewers see is what I was actually experiencing,” Tucker said. “I think that’s why it’s (actually impacted people;) it’s so raw, people who have denied (the Holocaust) before can’t deny this because it’s like they’re there with me seeing the stories.”

When sharing her story to a Florida middle school class, Tucker said, the tone of the room changed after she played the docuseries. Students were at first giggling about how little they knew about the Holocaust, then came around to empathy.

“To see that instant change was crazy after just having that one conversation,” Tucker said. “That’s why I keep posting about” Holocaust remembrance.

She’s also pushing for Holocaust education to be required in more states. Some teachers have themselves even incorporated the film into their lessons.

Finding new ways to be creative with Holocaust education is crucial in this era of “swiping if something is longer than 15 seconds,” Tucker said. And “the fact that (the series) is getting off of social media and going into classrooms is pretty cool.”

She’s living the type of life her grandparents did despite all the life-shattering things they endured, being a voice for Jews who fear publicly standing up for their truths, remembering her grandmother and grandfather’s biggest lesson: To never give up.

Watch the full 23-minute film on YouTube.