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July 11, 2003/Tamuz 11 5763, Vol. 55, No.46
Earlier not necessarily better to learn Holocaust lessons
YOSEF I. ABRAMOWITZ
Jewish Family & Life
My children attend a wonderful preschool, where Jewish values and holidays are lived and learned in creative ways. Yet my daughter Aliza's class recently learned about the Holocaust.
This is a bad idea.
I give lectures frequently across the country on Jewish identity, and people often come up to me afterward to tell me their stories. Sometimes adult women will tell me of nightmares they had as children based on Holocaust stories and how this has negatively affected their relationship with Judaism.
So much of public Jewish life is filled with Holocaust commemoration. This is understandable, but not necessarily wise. We are the last generation to live among a generation of survivors who have important stories to tell. And the world is still in desperate need of learning the lessons of standing up to tyranny and genocide. So the Holocaust must be taught, contextualized and univer-salized.
For the first time in 2,000 years, we have the oppor-tunity to raise a generation of Jewish children who will not fear the shadow of history or their Christian neighbors. The creative energies that are likely to be unleashed by this proud, unrestricted generation are necessary for a community that is lacking the audacity to name and live a compelling vision.
Aliza and her sister, Hallel, will learn about the Holocaust when they are 8 or 9, when they understand time as linear.
Younger children usually cannot distinguish between what was last year, last month or a decade or century ago. But they do know there was a world of ancient Israel and the Torah and there is a "now."
The Pharaohs and Hamans didn't look like us, used bows and arrows, rode on horses and lived in a time that was clearly different than our own.
In looking at one of the children's Holocaust books, I noticed that it lacked this kind of differentiation. The victims were like us, dressed like us, looked like us. The bad guys drove cars, wore modern uniforms, carried guns, used radios and worked in modern-looking buildings.
I do not want my children looking over their shoulders in case someone is an anti-Semite. And I certainly don't want them to know about concentration camps, as the children's book describes.
The book in question is actually a translated Israeli children's book, which explains a lot. That also makes it suspect. Israeli children at a young age are subjected to various commemorations of wars and tragedies; it's part of the national culture and psyche. But I don't want my children to have a Masada complex, believing they cannot trust the rest of the world.
Yet this is not only an Israeli issue. Each year there are more and more children's Holocaust books printed in the United States.
There is a consensus among Holocaust educators that "teaching about the Holo-caust before the age of 8 is counter-productive," says Shari Werb, an educator at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. "Children will only come away with nightmares. Even 8 is very young, unless the family has firsthand exper-ience and there is a reason to talk about it,'' she says.
Give your children eight to nine years of positive Jewish experiences and education, at home and at school. Fill their world, bookshelves and spongy minds with biblical stories, rabbinic legends and glorious history.
If there are any survivors in your family, they should tell their stories, but leave out the gory details. If you have lost family in the Holocaust, light a yahrzeit (memorial) candle at home and explain, again without the details, why you are lighting it.
By thinking twice about when to tell our children about this terrible episode in human and Jewish history, perhaps we will rethink our community's obsessions with the past and invest in a more positive future.
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