Last autumn, when Kanye West’s antisemitic social media tirade was at its height, one of the rapper’s songs came on at the gym where Elizabeth Pipko was working out.

It prompted a conversation between the American model, 27, and some teenage girls who were also there. “They asked me what he’d done. They’d heard things but said they were confused,” she told the JC.

Kanye West

Kanye West (Getty Images)

Pipko gave them a crash course in antisemitism and the Holocaust “that blew their minds.” And then, she decided to create a virtual Holocaust museum to educate other young people about the Shoah.

Launched last week to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Lest People Forget Project – also known as EducateKanye.com – features photographs of letters written by Jewish prisoners  in concentration camps. But as the project grows, Pipko will add images of other artefacts from the Nazi regime.

“Teenagers aren’t very interested in history, but they do engage with images and tech,” she told the JC.

The Harvard graduate says her modelling work  -- she’s appeared on the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, Maxim and Grazia magazines – has given her access to people she is unlikely to have otherwise met.  That includes the disgraced rapper himself who she has met twice.

Pipko hopes he has since “taken the time” to look at her website. Should their paths cross again, she “would ask if he understand how much danger Jews are in, even just walking down the street in New York. And I’d remind him just how much influence his words have.”