Daniel Feldman (daniel.feldman@yadvashem.org.il) is a member of the faculty at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies, Israel’s standard-bearer on Holocaust memory, research and education. In this article, he describes the institution’s approach to education. Read the accompanying article, “Beginning Holocaust Education” here.

What motivates our continuing focus on teaching the Holocaust? To be sure, the fervent last wish of countless Jews murdered during the Shoah was that their deaths not be consigned to oblivion. “Pray for us, remember us, and tell your children how we were tormented to death,” wrote one Holocaust victim in an urgent final letter to her daughter, Kay Fyne. Jewish tradition from the Bible and halakhah through contemporary ethical thought (Margalit, 2004) takes seriously the notion of a final will and testament that later generations are duty-bound to honor. In that sense, we have a profound obligation to respect millions of Jewish Holocaust victims by devotedly teaching their memory.

But education is about more than bearing tribute to the past. Unlike the historian, whose task is exclusively to understand historic events, the educator must elicit meaning from the past and distill that meaning into lessons which will be meaningful for students today. Yad Vashem engages in both historical research and educational activity, but we draw a clear line between the work of the historian and the responsibility of an educator. While the historian’s duty is to remain unswervingly true to circumstances of the past, the educator must find meaning in what the historian uncovers to empower students who will create the world of tomorrow.

How do we create meaning out of a national event as traumatic as the Shoah? For us at Yad Vashem’s International School of Holocaust Studies (ISHS), this entails scrutinizing how the historic past and pedagogic present influence each other. Our educational philosophy and method reflect an enduring commitment to expressing the specificity of the Shoah as a Jewish event with universal significance for how we conceive of our identities as Jews and relationships to neighbors, community, and humanity today.

This article summarizes the key tenets of our pedagogical theory and method with an emphasis on how our approach is best adapted for Jewish educational institutions. Our findings are based on a wealth of experience we acquired since we organized the ISHS as the official arm for Holocaust education in 1993. The only school of its kind in the world, the ISHS is fully accredited by Israel’s Ministry of Education and produces educational programs and material for a wide range of teachers and partner groups in Israel and abroad. While our approach is constantly evolving in response to emerging historical and educational research as well as changing contemporary circumstances, we never cease to pose fundamental questions such as “Why teach the Holocaust?” and “How do I teach the Holocaust to my students?” – questions which serve as the organizing inquiries of this essay.

We point to five main arguments for teaching the Shoah:

1. Because it happened.
2. Because it is sufficiently circumscribed to be taught as a well-defined curricular unit for multiple grades and levels.
3. Because it is general enough to touch on major issues of Jewish education, including Jewish identity, memory, values, and ethics.
4. Because it depicts life under extreme conditions.
5. Because it is an essential part of both Jewish legacy and the universal experience of global collective memory.

The first justification – that the Shoah be taught because it happened – is self-evident and unequivocal. An event as momentous and horrific as the Shoah cannot but continue to cause tremors that shake our national, religious, intellectual, and emotional foundations to the core even three generations later. If we protest a certain ennui regarding the subject, it is likely because we have not thought candidly or seriously enough about it.

The second and third justifications contradict each other, as do the fourth and fifth. Is the Shoah an independent lesson – an historical outlier – that stands apart from the rest of the curriculum (as reasons two and four suggest) or is it an integral part of general education (three and five)? Primo Levi, for instance, called Auschwitz “a gigantic biological and social experiment” (Levi, 1958) examining humanity through the exempla of limit cases. Likewise, is the Shoah part of Jewish or world history? Is there a specifically Jewish perspective on Holocaust education? These questions are not trivial; on the contrary, they influence critical decisions about when, where, and how to teach the Shoah.

Theory: A Challenge to Western and Jewish Education

On the one hand, the Shoah poses a direct challenge to the basic thrust of general Western pedagogy with its emphasis on progress through education. Until the Holocaust, the dominant modern conception of Western ethics was the one introduced by Immanuel Kant who claimed that increased knowledge led to greater moral stature. Ethics were something one acquired through study. The Holocaust changed that. Enlightenment values such as intellectual achievement, scientific progress, and trust in the civilizing role of culture were betrayed by the Nazis in their war against the Jews. Eight of the fifteen participants in the Nazis’ Wannsee Conference to coordinate the Final Solution held doctorates. Leading German physicians, researchers, and engineers helped plan and implement the killing. What surety against barbarism does modern education provide if it cannot guard against debasement of basic humanity?

As teachers, we believe that the Holocaust forces us to revisit and revise the aims of education. That the Shoah occurred in what was then the most civilized country in the Western world does not contradict Western values but exposes their fragility. Critical thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1947/1972) as well as Holocaust scholars such as Zygmunt Bauman (1989) assert that the Shoah was not impeded but rather facilitated by modern culture. The Shoah, then, as a humanistic via negativa exposing the worst of human nature, represents a crisis of modernity and hence of Western humanistic education.

In light of the frailty of Western reason, the Holocaust transforms our very responsibility as educators. How is general education changed after the Shoah? The basic enterprise of learning is called into question, since the acquisition of knowledge, we now recognize, can never be a higher value than the development of morals. What form of education emerges after the Shoah? That crucial question is still open, but what is “incontrovertible,” says Yehuda Bauer (2000), “is that the culture of modernity did nothing to deter or prevent the Shoah. Modernity does not in itself protect. This idea calls for a rethinking of education: we need to instill more than mere facts; we need to teach humanity in its profound compassion.” Holocaust education, we propose, is precisely a lesson in going beyond intellectual study to teach humanity this profound ethical and emotional aspect of compassion.

Yet we also teach the Holocaust as a crisis for Jewish education. Because it took place in the heart of the industrialized West, the Holocaust is a topic of universal interest to educators around the world. Indeed, the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education has twenty-seven member states. But the Shoah was an event that specifically targeted the Jewish people, and therefore, the Holocaust must have unique meaning for Jewish educators. What is that special significance?

One-third of all Jewry died in the Shoah and the most vibrant centers of Jewish culture at the time were destroyed. Jewish individuals, families, and communities with specific histories and unique identities perished. The devastation to Jewish life wrought by the Holocaust indisputably alters contemporary Jewish priorities and pedagogy. Jewish life, including Jewish education, cannot be exactly the same after the Shoah as it was before. Theologian Emil Fackenheim (1994) goes so far as to say that after Auschwitz Judaism receives a new imperative, “The Commanding Voice of Auschwitz,” which decrees in a famous “614th commandment”:

Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories. They are commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. They are commanded to remember the victims of Auschwitz lest their memory perish. They are forbidden to despair of man and his world, and to escape into either cynicism or otherworldliness, lest they cooperate in delivering the world over to the forces of Auschwitz. Finally, they are forbidden to despair of the God of Israel, lest Judaism perish.

As teachers, we cannot answer weighty theological questions, nor should we try to do so. Yet the Shoah undoubtedly caused a rupture in our collective identity that we are only now beginning to register. Just as the hurban, the destruction of the Temple, led to essential changes in Jewish religious life that took root over generations following the catastrophe, perhaps the Holocaust transformed our national political life in ways that we are only now learning to comprehend. But our responsibility as teachers of the Shoah is to open up our classrooms as safe spaces in which students can pose the crucial questions about how the Holocaust informs their personal and collective notions of community, peoplehood, and nation.

How do we combine these general and specifically Jewish aspects of Holocaust history? How do we convey the traumatic and unprecedented character of the Shoah while connecting it to the larger arc of Jewish tradition? Moreover, how do we communicate to students a sense of Eastern European Jewish heritage that does not succumb to the “lachrymose theory” of Jewish martyrdom and woe that Salo Baron warned against in 1928?

Our response is to teach the Shoah as the story of Jewish individuals whose rich pre-war personal histories and inspiring efforts to survive in a world of tragedy and chaos elevate the lived history of the Shoah above any ideology to which the event may be instrumentalized. When the Shoah is taught with rigorous attention to historical detail and empathy for the individuals who suffered the event, students draw their own insightful inferences both about other events and about why the Holocaust continues to be important for them as members of families, Jewish communities, and world society.

Method: The Shoah as the Story of Jewish Life

Five key themes constitute our approach of teaching the Holocaust as the story of individual Jewish lives. We emphasize:

1. The diversity and vitality of pre-war Jewish life
2. Attempts to sustain Jewish identity under cruel and chaotic circumstances
3. Bystanders and the significance of rescuers and helpers
4. Perpetrators
5. Post-war return to life

All of these concepts appear recursively as modules throughout our curriculum. They repeat with increasing complexity as students mature and learn to build on their prior Holocaust education with growing sophistication. The curriculum is also designed for maximum interdisciplinary versatility. We encourage an approach to Holocaust education that leverages art, history, literature, drama, music, philosophy, and Jewish thought to afford students access to the meaning of the event through a range of avenues. (For more on the question of when to begin Holocaust education and Yad Vashem’s spiral model of family, community, and society, see the sidebar accompanying this article.) Furthermore, our five key concepts coalesce to provide an intimate portrait of Jewish individuals during the Shoah that is both representative of the larger array of victims and respectful of how victims might have wished to be remembered. A Holocaust pedagogy that restores individual humanity and personal identity to anonymous and faceless Holocaust victims fulfills the primary mission of Yad Vashem, as described in Isaiah 56:6 – “to give a memory (yad) and name (shem)” to the victims. It also opposes the Nazi project of not only murdering Jews, but effacing their memory and obliterating every last trace of their lives.

1. Pre-war Jewish life: We cannot teach the Shoah without appreciating what was lost. And what was lost was hardly the archaic Jewish shtetl inaccurately depicted in nostalgic portrayals of Jews in the Pale of Settlement. In fact, on the eve of the Holocaust the Jews of Europe were a diverse population living in urban and rural settings and in religious and secular communities boasting a breathtaking diversity of cultures and beliefs. We often use the example of Mordechai Anielewicz, eventual commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, whose prewar history as a dynamic youth leader in the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist movement provided him with contacts and qualities that later helped propel him to the leadership of the ghetto underground. Jewish pre-war youth were youngsters in the throes of modern challenges: they wrestled with how to improve their world, how to reconcile Zionism and Diaspora, and how to preserve or renew tradition in a changing world. The encounter between contemporary Jewish students and pre-war Jewish youth is significantly enriched when teachers seriously engage the Jewish world before the war.

2. Jewish identity during the Shoah: Survival was the exception during the Holocaust. Two out of every three European Jews perished at Nazi hands. Against such an appalling backdrop of death and suffering, the task of educators is to produce pedagogical meaning that will benefit their students. We do that by asking not how Jews died during the Holocaust, but how they lived – even under the shadow of death. Our curriculum emphasizes remarkable efforts to retain Jewish identity in the ghettos, camps, hiding places, and forests of Nazi Europe. We teach about how Jews formed self-help societies; mounted heroic spiritual, martial, and cultural resistance; and maintained Jewish day-to-day life even under the most difficult circumstances.

Our priority in teaching this principle is to convey to students the reality that Jews faced under the Nazis and the ways that Jews confronted those conditions. The Nazi universe was characterized by a cruel logic of what literary scholar Lawrence Langer (1982) calls “choiceless choices.” Yet Jews like Dr. Abrasha Weinrib continued to assert their humanity by facing unspeakable dilemmas with awe-inspiring dignity and morality. Dr. Weinrib was chief doctor of the Vilna Ghetto hospital, where supplies of critical medicines were dwindling by Spring 1942. Facing the dilemma of whether to prescribe the precious remaining drugs to patients who stood a better chance of recovery or to distribute medicine democratically, but inadequately, to all patients, Dr. Weinrib assembled a council of ghetto leaders to decide the matter: three doctors, a rabbi, and a lawyer met to debate the case. The rabbi who participated in the debate said: “Only God knows when to give life or take it … The decision lying before us, those gathered in this room, gives us no sanction or moral power to usurp a divine prerogative, even if it appears there is no other choice” (Weinrib, 1979). We discuss the conclusion to the debate in our teacher training seminars, but the true significance of the debate is simply that it occurred.

By assembling colleagues in the midst of the ghetto to weigh horrific moral choices, Dr. Weinrib asserted his continuing humanity and individual agency, even in a context of dehumanization. Our educational approach is concerned with Jewish doctors during the Holocaust, not Nazi doctors, since it is through confrontation with the terrifying dilemmas that Jews of all ages and backgrounds faced that we discover their will to retain personal identity. Studying the dilemmas of the Shoah converts contemporary Jewish students’ attitudes toward their Holocaust-era forbears from judgment to empathy. Our approach strives to defuse condescending questions about “why the Jews did not do more” before the questions are asked.

3. Bystanders to rescuers: In ordinary life, most of us are bystanders. Neither oppressors nor victims, we face the ongoing challenge of perceiving and responding to the humanity of the downtrodden other. Our learning units on bystanders, rescuers, and helpers underscore the transition rescuers made from neutrality to engagement. We focus on this metamorphosis since it demonstrates that social behavior is not deterministic: personal change is indeed possible, especially when one succeeds, as the righteous did, in seeing the persecuted victim not as “other,” but as a fellow parent, child, citizen, and individual whose humanity is commensurate to one’s own.

In addition, we study the Righteous among the nations, a term coined by Maimonides (Mishneh Torah Hilkhot Melakhim 8:11), to reflect the stress Jewish tradition places on hakarat hatov, the expression of thanks. Holocaust-era rescuers, whose actions stood out from the silence of the indifferent masses, have undeniably earned the Jewish people’s eternal gratitude.

4. Perpetrators: “The premier demand made on education is that Auschwitz never happen again,” writes Theodor Adorno in “Education After Auschwitz” (1998). The first step toward that goal, he says, is “to recognize the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds.” Our study of the Nazis and their accomplices focuses on the educational, cultural, and political mechanisms that produced mass killers who were diametrically opposed to the rescuers in that they failed to see Jews as human. Some of these dehumanizing mechanisms – propaganda, social pressure, avarice, careerism – are universal, while others – redemptive anti-Semitism, Nazi millennial ideology – were unique to the Third Reich. Our responsibility as educators is to be aware of how pedagogy can inure or sensitize us to the plight of the other. We hope to ensure that our students understand the Torah’s message of social responsibility in its warning lo tukhal lehitalem, “you must not remain indifferent” (Deuteronomy 22:3).

5. Return to life: Our final recurring motif is the post-war return to life. Survivors emerged from the traumas of the camps broken and lonely. They persevered, however, and built new lives in new lands. That astounding renewal was not obvious. Survivors gave new interpretation to vengeance by affirming life: though they lived their lives under the pale of trauma, survivors sought and found revenge by raising families, contributing to community and nation, and helping to repair the world. Their legacy of tikun olam is the lasting rebuttal to the Nazi destructive ambition. That legacy also stands as a model for contemporary Jewish education, the inculcation of Jewish values threatened by the Holocaust, restored by survivors, and bequeathed by teachers to the Jewish students of tomorrow.

References

Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (1972). Dialectic of Enlightenment (J. Cumming, trans.). New York: Herder and Herder.

Adorno, T. (1998). “Education After Auschwitz.” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (H. Pickford, trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Bauer, Y. (2000). Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Fackenheim, E. (1994). To Mend the World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Bauman, Z. (1989). Modernity and The Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Langer, L. (1982). Versions of Survival. Binghamton, NY: State University of New York Press.

Levi, P. (1958). If This Is a Man (S. Woolf, trans.). London: Orion Press. (1956)

Margalit, A. (2002). The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Weinrib, A. (1979). Zikhronot shel rofe me-geto vilna. Yalkut Moreshet 27, 45-63 (Heb.).