- HOME
- Table of Contents
- Resume
- Philosophy Statement
- 1. History of Jewish/General Education
- 2. Assessment
- 3. Curriculum
- 4. Language Development/Hebrew
- 5. Personal Development of Teachers
- 6. Collaboration/Community
- 7. Technology
- 8. Learning and Cognition
- 9. Evidence-Based Practice
- 10. Child Development
- 11. Content Knowledge
- 12. Ethics and Values
- 13. Instructional Methods
- Inspiration/Chizuk
- Post-Observation Reflections
As a granddaughter of survivors, I have been perpetually interested in both the personal stories of my grandparents’ lives, and the collective story of the Jewish People, before, during, and after the Holocaust. I have interviewed my grandparents over the years. I have traveled to Eastern Europe twice to see first-hand the closest evidence we have of the unbelievable atrocities committed against my own people, including my immediate family. I am extremely grateful and fortunate to still have my grandparents, and recognize the unique opportunity to connect with them, and connect through them to this significant era of their lives, and of world history.
However, we are remiss if we teach the Holocaust in Jewish schools without putting it into context of the larger Jewish communities that existed pre-War, and larger Jewish history in general. While the Holocaust was uniquely terrible for modern times, the Jews have known persecution and suffering under many occasions. An honest study of Jewish history must begin with the Torah itself, when the Israelites were enslaved in Pharoah’s Egyptian prison of humiliation and torture. Treatment under Babylonian and Roman oppressors was similarly barbaric. Indeed, on my first trip to Poland, each teen in my group took turns teaching verses from Megillat Eicha, which bemoans the destruction of the Temple and loss of Jewish sovereignty, with extreme starvation and death. The 2500-year-old scroll reads like an account of the horrors of the 20th century Holocaust (but actually worse). Two millennia in the Diaspora has created “the wandering Jew”, exiled from one country to the next, happy merely to survive the travails. While many are too liberal to admit it, it is all a repeated pattern of assimilation, of the Jews trying to blend into our host culture, causing our hosts to reject us via persecution, which is the veiled hand of G-d to remind us that we are meant to be different.
I believe that every person must learn about the Holocaust as a lesson in the dangers of hate and racism. While we do need to realize and respect diversity and maintain our individuality, we can still respect others for their differences. Nowadays we are seeing an alarming increase in acts of hate, specifically anti-Semitism, often veiled as anti-Zionism. We must be educated about history in order to be sensitive and honest to these trends, and cannot ignore the red flags of racism that always lurk under a thin veneer of cultured civility.
As a “3-G” or 3rd-generation survivor, in a fateful time of seeing both survivors and those who deny or are ignorant of this most horrific era of the last century, I seek to be an articulate advocate of the truths of the Holocaust, the realities of those who perished and those who survived. As fewer survivors remain, I hope more Jew realize that we are the next chapter in the story of Jewish history, and that we must remember those who DIED as Jews in order to strengthen our commitment to LIVE as Jews.