Dr. Paul Radensky is the Museum Educator for Jewish Schools at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, where he organizes professional training seminars for teachers and yemei iyyun for students. Dr. Radensky has taught at the Bernard Revel Graduate School for Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University, the North Shore Hebrew Academy High School, the 92nd Street Y, and Queens College. In this article, he identifies major themes to avoid, and major themes to emphasize, in Holocaust education.
The Holocaust is one the most important events of Jewish history and an event of singular significance for understanding the Jewish experience in the 20th century. Even as we recognize the importance of teaching our students about the Holocaust, for educators who wish to instill a positive identity in their students, the Holocaust as a subject is fraught with danger. The very negative character of the Holocaust creates a number of pitfalls that can trip up educators who are teaching it. Nevertheless, there are important lessons that can and should be taught. In this article, I will suggest a number of ways in which teachers in Jewish schools can educate their students effectively about the Holocaust.[1]
Before teachers begin teaching about the Holocaust, they should review for themselves the importance of Holocaust education. In addition to learning the history, what do you want your students to come away with? How will you accomplish this? Are the resources and approach you plan to take appropriate for the age of your students? At the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, we advise that, generally, the Holocaust not be addressed until sixth or preferably seventh grade, since younger students will not have the maturity to deal such a difficult topic. Of course, each teacher knows his or her students and in conversation with school administration and families will decide what is appropriate.
In addition to knowing where you want to go, you should also have a sense of where you do not want to go. One pitfall in teaching the Holocaust is focusing too much on Jewish victimhood. There are some who see a certain nobility in being the greatest sufferer and some who argue that Jews are never safe. It is true that the world is a dangerous place. But we do our students a disservice when we focus exclusively on Jewish vulnerability. Regrettably, hatred and prejudice is endemic to the human condition and Jews are far from being the sole target. We need look only at twentieth century genocides to find ample evidence of deadly movements and events. While it has been rare in history for Jews to have been popular in the countries in which they resided there are long stretches in history in which Jews lived securely alongside their non-Jewish neighbors. Jewish victimhood must be acknowledged but we have to be careful not to overemphasize it. If we spend too much time focusing on anti-Jewish hatred, we may succeed in convincing our students that Jews are vulnerable and weak and must withdraw from the world. If we follow this line of reasoning, we may give the impression that Jews are unable to take action for the benefit of themselves or others.
Some educators feel that horrors of the Holocaust must be highlighted to show the necessity of the State of Israel. I am troubled by this approach. While the Holocaust does underscore the urgency of the need to have a Jewish state, the establishment of the State should not be portrayed as a logical outcome of the Holocaust. My concern in this approach is that one could come to see the Holocaust as a necessary evil that had to happen in order for the state to exist. When I was in college, I remember sitting in on a Shabbat lunch in which a guest, a Holocaust survivor, asked one of the students at the table: what would have been better, to have no Holocaust, but no state of Israel, or to have Israel, but also have the Holocaust? The student answered better to have the Holocaust and Israel than the other way around. This thinking is both incorrect and dangerous. The Holocaust did not “need” to happen. It was the result of the sinister plans of Hitler and the Nazi machine and then also of an increasing number of collaborators. The desire to create a state of Israel would have existed even if there had not been a Holocaust. Anti-Semitism from without pushed the Jews to develop their own homeland. A desire to recreate Jewish life – from many perspectives – motivated Zionists from within. The Holocaust made the necessity of a Jewish state clear to the non-Jewish world, but it did not launch the Zionist movement which began in the late nineteenth century.
Another pitfall is the tendency to be judgmental. When teaching the Holocaust, we should withhold judgment of the victims, and I am coming to believe that we should withhold judgment about many of the bystanders as well. The dilemmas that the victims of the Holocaust found themselves in were very complex. If we find it easy to criticize today, for example, the ghetto Jewish councils that seemed to cooperate too quickly with the Nazis it is because we have the benefit of hindsight. When studying something that took place over sixty years ago, we are most likely learning from an historical interpretation that was probably written long after the events it describes. The same thing could be said about bystanders. We would hope that when the Nazis were mistreating or killing Jews in Poland or Ukraine that their non-Jewish neighbors would intervene on behalf of the Jews. Some Poles and Ukrainians did protect Jews and we might do well to remember that helping Jews meant risking their own lives or the lives of their family members. This fact should give us pause and remind us that, rather than condemn victims and bystanders, we should try to analyze what they did and what their circumstances were. In this way our students will be more empathetic and open-minded towards all those living under the Nazi regime.
In presenting the Holocaust, many have the tendency to teach using Nazi timelines and victories to plot out the Holocaust. To some extent, this is unavoidable since the Holocaust was perpetrated by the Nazis, but using these guideposts alone is deficient in that by nature they can only tell half the story. If we really want our students to have a deeper understanding of the Holocaust, they have to know what the Jewish experience was and for this we must use Jewish sources. This point is critical. When we study the Holocaust using Jewish archival material, artifacts, memoirs or testimony we show how the Jews were active and resourceful under horrific circumstances. In some cases they may be controversial (such as Reszo Kastner or Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski), but they will be real human beings who made decisions. In this way, we will remember the Jewish victims in a way which is more true to reality and more pedagogically sound than seeing them as numbers to be killed off.
When we teach the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective, we will be teaching a very different narrative. A key part of this narrative is the history of Jewish resistance. It is often thought that Jewish resistance was limited to the partisans in the forest and did not accomplish much. Both of these assumptions are incorrect. A recent exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust entitled Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust showed that Jews resisted each stage of the Nazi persecution in ways that made sense in their historical context. In Germany before Kristallnacht, Jewish leaders did not consider armed rebellion as an option since they felt that such a step would cause more harm than good, and besides, the Jewish community would survive the anti-Semitic decrees of the government, as it had done so in the past. Although they did not take up arms, German Jews did take action. When they lost their jobs and when they were expelled from schools, they created their own Jewish social service agencies and Jewish schools. They also organized emigration. Between 1933 and 1939, more than half of Germany’s Jewish population left the country.
Jewish resistance to the Nazis took place in Poland, as well, after that country was occupied. When Jews were forced to live in ghettos, they established clandestine schools, soup-kitchens, clinics, theaters, and religious institutions so they could maintain their human dignity and physical well-being. As the Nazis began deporting ghetto residents to extermination camps, organizing escape became an important part of Jewish resistance. A phenomenal example of this was the escape tunnel that the prisoners of the Novogroduk ghetto dug in 1943. Two hundred Jews escaped and many joined the partisans. Among those who joined the partisans, most were committed to fight, but some, like the Bielski brothers (the subjects of the recent film, Defiance) were intent on rescuing Jews above all else, and managed to save over a thousand men, women, and children – an extraordinary accomplishment. It also should be mentioned that, throughout the Holocaust, Jews also defied the Nazis by maintaining their religious lives despite incredible odds. There were cases of people who took tremendous risks to observe Shabbat, to wear teffilin, or to blow the shofar on Rosh Hashanah. Others, such as Tzila Orlean, a teacher from the Bais Yaakov girls’ school in Cracow, did not let the Nazis beat her down and tried to save whomever she could in Auschwitz.
Another topic which does not receive as much attention as it should is rescue. There were manifold rescue efforts undertaken on behalf of European Jews. One reason this topic is sometime avoided is the criticism that the rescue attempts were too few and ineffectual. Of course, we wish there had more rescue efforts, but many attempts were made and some were successful. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee funded many rescue efforts and did all it could to save Jewish lives. The Bergson group, led by Hillel Kook (a.k.a. Peter Bergson) conducted a strenuous campaign (including the Rabbis’ March on Washington in 1943) to bring the plight of the European Jews to the attention of the American public and American political leadership. There were also attempts by individual American Jews to rescue their relatives in Europe. Michael Winerip (1997) from the New York Times wrote a very compelling article in 1997 about the partially successful efforts of a Jewish shoe salesman in West Virginia to save his cousin and the latter’s wife and daughter.
Similarly heroic activities of non-Jewish rescuers should also be made known. Social worker Irena Sendler smuggled thousands of Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto in order to save their lives; entrepreneur Oskar Schindler employed and protected about one thousand Jews in his factory in Plaszow; Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara issued thousands of transit visas to Lithuanian Jews; diplomat Raoul Wallenberg gave Swedish passes of protection to Jews in Hungary; the Danish people organized a country-wide rescue of their Jews and ferried them to safety to Sweden. The work of these dedicated people should be celebrated in its own right and, as educators, I believe that we should keep them in mind as models for emulation.
This leads me to my final point. What do we, as teachers, want our students to learn when they study the Holocaust? They will certainly learn the capacity of humans to behave sadistically towards one another, but it is likely that our students already understood that even before the class started. A more useful lesson and one which we hope will help develop our students as Jews and as human beings, is the importance of individual initiative in bringing about positive change. This idea is exemplified in the lives of the resisters and the Jewish and non-Jewish rescuers. Each one of these people made a stand for human life and human dignity, and each demonstrated how much an individual can do. We hope, of course, that our students will never have to endure anything remotely similar to the Holocaust, but we hope that by learning about those who took a stand during the Holocaust, that they will be inspired to do the same when they will encounter whatever challenges life will send them.
References
Winerip, Michael. “’Dear Cousin Julius, We Trust on Our God and on You,’” New York Times, Sunday, April 27, 1997.
[1] This essay elaborates a number of the ideas in the Museum’s STAJE Guiding Principles for Teaching the Shoah in Jewish Schools (New York, 2005). Development of the STAJE Guiding Principles was generously funded by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany: Rabbi Israel Miller Fund for Shoah Research, Documentation and Education. The STAJE Guiding Principles can be found online at http://www.mjhnyc.org/pdfs/education/teacher/guiding.pdf.