Jewish Foundation Offers U.S. Teachers Holocaust History Lessons
by Jim Brown
July 15, 2005
(AgapePress) - A Jewish organization is trying to give master teachers an understanding of the complex subject of the Holocaust and help them introduce it to their students in the classroom.Teachers from 11 different states recently gathered at Columbia University to attend a five-day Holocaust Teacher Education Program sponsored by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. The program targeted middle and high school English and social studies teachers from private, public, and parochial schools.
The foundation's executive vice president, Stanlee Stahl, says most teachers don't know the history of the Holocaust. "While some states have mandates to teach the Holocaust," she notes, "other states do not. And some of the teacher education, while well intentioned, is perhaps not the best."
Stahl says most students learn of the Holocaust by reading The Diary of Anne Frank in eighth-grade English or language arts. But according to the Foundation spokeswoman, studying the famous young Holocaust victim's journal does not adequately cover this broad and complex subject. "Our approach is to teach teachers the history," she says. "We have learned that teachers do not teach what they do not know, or they do not teach it well."
The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous hopes to help English and social studies educators better understand not only the historical facts but also the nuances of the Holocaust and the societal factors that led up to it. "We started out with our very first chapter," Stahl says. "It's based on a book that we published, Voices and Views: the History of the Holocaust."
Using that text, she explains, "we started out with anti-Judaism differentiated from anti-Semitism as the antecedents for the Third Reich. We discussed the inter-war period. We discussed the rise of the Nazi Party. How did Germany -- the most cultured, civilized nation in western Europe -- [become the backdrop for the Holocaust?] How did it happen in Germany?"
Also, Stahl notes, the program discussed refugee policy, Christian life under German occupation, the machinery of death, and the murderers who killed six million Jews. The Foundation's hope, she says, is to bring educators to a deeper level of understanding about this tragic time in history so they in turn can offer that deeper understanding to their students.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
