Zachor, Remember! -- but What? and How?

Zachor, Remember! -- But What? And How? By Jeanette Friedman Introduction As someone who has been involved in Holocaust Education for more than 25 years, and as a daughter of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen survivors who was born in Brooklyn, NY, the only perspective I can offer is one from continued study and my own personal experience, most of it in the United States. I am familiar with materials that are used in suburban public high schools and in some Jewish private schools. I served as Education Coordinator for the then International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and as a Second Generation Education Liaison to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. I also served as a member of the [Arthur] Goldberg Commission to Examine the Role of American Jews During the Holocaust, which proved to be a valuable experience in determining some of the directions that Holocaust Education needed to take. This took place between the years 1972 and 1985. I realize that Europe is not the United States. On the other hand, we live in a global society, and young people share many, many ideas and attitudes and characteristics, no matter where they live. We also now have media and communication tools we never had at our disposal before, which should make us evaluate how we teach the Holocaust—what are its lessons, and are they true to the legacy the survivors want to leave behind? Below is an examination of what the survivors wanted to accomplish and what they have accomplished. In some areas they succeeded admirably, particularly in the public arena and at the university level. On the other hand, what is happening in secular and Jewish high school classrooms is another story altogether—and depending on who is teaching and how, results will vary. In the best case scenario, the result is character development of a young person into a decent, caring human being. In the worst, Holocaust education becomes a tool that creates disdain for Jewish people, ramps up the Victim Olympics, and creates the opposite of what it was supposed to do—old fashioned antisemitism and self-hatred with a modern twist. Tempus Fugit —The Survivors Are Running Out oF Time Madonna has a hit song that begins with the sound of a clock ticking. As the ticking continues to impose itself her voice chimes in: “Time goes by, so slowly, so slowly, so slowly.” Maybe for some, but not for everyone—time is passing like a runway train for Holocaust survivors and they worry that their legacy will be forgotten. Every day another personal connection to the past that so shaped our present and linked us to the seminal event of our age, to our murdered families and Yiddishkeit—our Yiddish culture, not our Judaism—is broken. And the time goes by so quickly, so quickly…so quickly. A conscientious person can spend every day, all day, paying respects at funerals and making shiva calls on Holocaust survivor families. It is a wrenching experience, made more difficult by 1 knowing that the lessons from those who are passing—from the Judaism of their childhoods, to the terror of the Holocaust, to the lives they rebuilt and gave us—are far from learned. In fact, in some places there is already erosion, misinterpretation, trivialization, and perhaps, worst of all, exploitation of the Holocaust as a means of raising funds for causes that have nothing to do with the Holocaust or for political purposes to create a siege mentality. It is a desecration to the Six Million that the aging and often ailing survivors find hard to swallow—along with their prohibitively expensive medical care. And every day the news gets worse and the survivors ask, “Is this why we survived?” From the first activist days of the Holocaust Education movement, which began in the 1970’s— though the historians were tackling the “academic” issues like statistics and causes before that— the Holocaust survivors, who had pledged to bear witness, knew that the story had to be told. It began with commemorations in communities of survivors who wanted to say Kaddish for their families, and that were basically ignored by the rest of the Jewish community. There were memoirs and books before, but no formal Holocaust education until the 1970s, when the sons and daughters of the survivors realized it was a subject that simply never came up, except at home. Rarely was the Holocaust taught in any school system, not Jewish, not secular, unless it was somehow mentioned in a history course on the college level. There was little or nothing for people to use in high school classrooms, and the event was not on anyone’s radar. There were certainly no statewide or national observances or commemorations. The Holocaust that so affected the Jews was not even a blip on the education radar screen, even in their own Jewish schools. Instead, in English literature courses in some schools, like in the Orthodox Beth Jacob School in Brooklyn, in the 60’s, students were assigned to read Elie Wiesel’s Night or The Diary of Anne Frank, two classics that remain the two most important works that influence young students. But very few educators tackled the subject itself because it raised too many theological questions they couldn’t handle; the event was too raw; and the lessons of the Holocaust hadn’t yet been figured out. In secular classrooms, it wasn’t even an issue. That changed when a television program aired in the United States. It was called Holocaust, produced by Gerald Green, and it was a frankly melodramatic interpretation of a fictional/realistic version of Holocaust stories called a docudrama. As a result, Holocaust deniers picketed the studios of the network, and the Holocaust survivors, their families and their allies realized that they needed to wake up the world to the story of the past. A movement to teach about the Holocaust was born, and with the self-empowerment of the survivors, the publishing of memoirs and the gathering of facts by historians, Holocaust education began to take shape. One of the first courses to be taught in the United States was the course given by Dr. Yaffa Eliach in Brooklyn College in 1972, where the class—mostly sons and daughters of survivors—were asked to go home and collect their parents’ testimonies. The result was an examination of the notion of “going like sheep to the slaughter,” which in turn 2 led to a discussion of collective responsibility and some philosophical discussion. Did it lead to action or character development? Judging by the students, it was hard to tell. On the other hand, Dr. Eliach developed the Center for Holocaust Studies. As a result, she collected the raw material that later enabled the designers of the Us Holocaust Memorial Museum to build the Tower of Faces (known to most as the Tower of Eishishok) because she realized was important to remember individuals, actual people, not corpses or statistics. Her resources and materials were eventually absorbed by the Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown New York. In the meantime, the Judaic Studies Department, created at the same time the class was first taught at Brooklyn College, featured scholars like Dr. Henry Friedlander and others. At first, then, everything was done at the university level. The Graduate Center of the City University presented a series of lectures by top scholars—some of whom were also survivors. Lecturers included Professors Yehuda Bauer, Henry Friedlander, Henry Feingold, Randolph Braham, Raul Hillberg, Eric Goldhagen—stellar researchers into facts and statistics, and it was all about the PROCESS of killing six million Jews, from the Einzatsgruppen to the gas chambers, and about political history and power. These lectures were free and open to the public. They were mostly attended by Holocaust survivors, sons and daughters of survivors, and history majors. This was something that took place after the survivors assembled in Israel at the World Gathering in 1981, and again at the American Gathering in Washington in 1983. These widely covered events empowered the survivors by using Holocaust education to galvanize governments into recognizing their responsibilities. Therefore you might say the first stage of Holocaust Education was “public education” for the public service sector. This resulted in the nationalization of the recognition of the Holocaust. That means that while in 1960, there were a handful of Holocaust commemorations, on Yom HaShoah in 2007, the Holocaust is remembered on a day that commemorates the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from sea to shining sea in the U.S. --as well as in cities and hamlets around the world. In synagogues and churches, on Capitol Hill and in state capitals and city hall, scholars and universities in virtually every state of the Union, commemorations are held annually. This “public education” also resulted in the creation of public institutions to teach the Holocaust: the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the memorial in Berlin, and hundreds of smaller resource centers and memorials around the world. Of course, the largest and most important of these repositories of information, testimony, history and memorialization is at Yad Vashem in Israel. “Public education” – and a strong dose of Iranian Holocaust denial -- also resulted in the United Nations, more than 60 years after the fact, finally formalizing commemoration and remembrance of the Holocaust on January 27, the day Auschwitz was liberated. Another result of this “public education” was that Holocaust denial was condemned by the UN’s member nations (though 92 nations did not approve the resolution), which was sponsored by the United States and Rwanda, earlier this year; and previously Holocaust denial was outlawed in a number of countries, including Germany, Canada and Austria.

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