It’s not every day that people see a group of high-schoolers walking from class to class wearing pedicure flip-flops on their feet.

   But that’s exactly what Hightstown High School freshman Stephanie Blitzer, a number of her classmates and thousands of students across the world did recently to raise awareness about Sudanese refugees displaced from their homes by the war in the Darfur region of Sudan.

   ”The shoes weren’t necessarily symbolic, but shoes are something people wear every day. We wanted people to give up a necessity for a day, and shoes are the easiest necessity to give up,” said 14-year-old Stephanie, who lives on Berkshire Drive in East Windsor.

   Stephanie is the social action programmer for her local chapter of the Zionist youth organization called Young Judaea. The global organization based in New York encourages Jewish youth to explore their religious identity and builds leadership and social activism skills, according to its Web site.

   Recently, Stephanie and a number of her counterparts from chapters across the globe decided they wanted to do something that would call attention to the plight of many Sudanese who found their villages destroyed and lives turned upside down by the ongoing conflict between black Africans and Arab militias in the western part of Sudan, a conflict that many activists and the U.S. government have called a genocide.

   ”We all said never again, that genocide would never happen again,” said Stephanie, referring to the Holocaust.

   ”Now, we’re all just standing by and watching this happen. It isn’t right, and I should do something about it. We all should,” she added.

   The concept started as a day without shoes, but Stephanie said school officials told her that being barefoot would be against the school’s dress code.

   When she learned through the social networking Web site Facebook that hundreds of other students were running into the same problem, she decided that she’d swap bare feet for pedicure flip-flops.

   ”They’re made of felt and very thin. When you step on something you’ll feel it and it’ll be as if you’re not wearing shoes for the day,” she said.

   She and her colleagues in Young Judaea put out a call to action on Facebook to have as many high-schoolers as possible either go barefoot or don unusual footwear on Oct. 21 as a way to shine a light on the issue.

   Soon, thousands of students from throughout North America, Europe and the Middle East had pledged to do so.

   ”There were tons of people saying that it was against dress code. So, I said, OK, wear something you wouldn’t normally wear like slippers or scuba diving flippers,” said Stephanie.

   ”The point of the event is to see what it’s like to give up one necessity for a day. The people from Darfur are running for their lives every day and starving, so giving up shoes is easy. It’s not like I’m asking people to fast for a week,” she added.

   Stephanie had dozens of flip-flops made and decided to sell them to interested students and donate the money to help fund work her sister Monica is doing in Israel.

   Many of the Sudanese refugees end up escaping across the Red Sea to Israel, and 19-year-old Monica is spending the year in that country with a Jewish student group called Garin Tzedek, the Hebrew phrase for group justice.

   ”Our goal is to build some of the refugees a nursery,” Monica said in a telephone interview from Arad, Israel.

   ”They were evicted from the last place they were living and the new place is a dump. It needs to be renovated, cleaned up, painted and the ceilings need to be fixed. It’s not fit for children,” she added.

   Her time in Israel is part of an informal education program where she takes classes accredited through the California-based American Jewish University. In her spare time, Monica not only volunteers helping out the refugees, but teaching Hebrew to local youth.

   ”It’s an amazing experience,” Monica said.

   ”Arad is an immigrant town in the desert full of Russians, Sudanese, Americans. It’s an interesting and diverse place to live. I feel I have a whole new sense of independence,” she added.

   Monica also was a member of Young Judaea and said she is “extremely proud” of her little sister for the cause she has taken up.

   ”She was kind of shy, but I pushed her into becoming the social action programmer because she was always into social action. On her own, she just called me up and asked what she could do to help out,” Monica said.

   Stephanie’s mother, Jerri Blitzer, also said she was proud of what her daughter is doing.

   ”I’m thrilled that she’s getting involved with something that is very important, and that she can think beyond herself,” Ms. Blitzer said.

   Stephanie says she’s just doing it to help effect change over the situation in Sudan.

   ”I just want to help out Darfur by raising awareness. If someone is walking down the street not wearing shoes, you might stop them and ask why,” she said.

   ”Then you can tell them about what’s happening in Darfur. Tell them to write your congressmen and ask them come up with a bill to stop this genocide.”