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January 21, 2005/Shevat 11 5765, Vol. 57, No. 21
Learning how to teach the Holocaust
HEATHER ROBINSON
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - One by one, the seventh-graders entered the classroom, each telling a story about someone whose life had been touched by Kristallnacht.
Next, one of the children read the order, signed by Heinrich Himmler, calling for the murder of Jews throughout Germany and the destruction of their property throughout Germany and Austria in 1938.
"It's important for them to know that the Holocaust happened," said Maureen Marullo, a teacher who assigned the exercise to her students at Loggers' Run Middle School in Boca Raton, Fla., "and that some of the people who resisted - who hid Jews and others - were ordinary people."
Marullo was among some 20 teachers chosen to attend a seminar over the weekend in Elizabeth, N.J., that offered in-depth study of the Holocaust and discussions about teaching the subject to middle and high school students. The advanced seminar was coordinated by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, a nonprofit organization dedicated to identifying, honoring and supporting those non-Jews known as Righteous Gentiles, who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
The seminar comes slightly more than a week before the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is commemorated on Jan. 27.
"We work to educate teachers about the Holocaust because that's what we feel will make the most difference in terms of preventing such horrors from occurring in the future," she said.
Deborah Dwork, professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., has lectured at many foundation seminars. She said teachers have approached her with questions about teaching the Holocaust to various groups of students. They have asked her for help on teaching the Holocaust to students and others not used to thinking of Jews as an oppressed group.
"The Germans saw Jews as a separate race, but today Americans don't," she said. "I've lectured in schools where black students have come to me and said, 'Could those white people really have been that stupid?' in believing that Jews were subhuman.
"I tell them first of all, that yes, they were that stupid, and then branch out into discussion of how race is a made-up categorization. At different times over the centuries, people have different ways have defining categories, but these distinctions are always made up."
In the Valley, the Bureau of Jewish Education sponsors an annual day-long conference for teachers on the Holocaust. The 2005 Carolyn Nathan Annual Educators Conference on the Holocaust and Its Lessons will be held on March 7 and will feature Gerda Weissman Klein.
Last year's conference brought more than 130 English and social studies teachers together from around the Valley. One of those teachers, Kim Klett, was inspired by the conference and began teaching a Holocaust class at Dobson High School in Mesa.
"I think on the local level it's been a wonderful experience because it affects kids," said Klett. "It gets them thinking differently."
Klett has traveled to various areas of the country to speak about the Holocaust and how to teach it to children. She was even a past recipient of the Mandel Fellowship, a program established in 1996 to develop a group of skilled secondary school teachers to serve as Holocaust education leaders in their schools and communities.
"I think it's opened up a lot of opportunities for me," she said.
Klett calls the conference "a great resource."
"They've been such a help," she said.
Jewish News staff writer Stephanie N. Henschel contributed to this article.
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