Lower School English Department Head Alton Price and Coordinator of Jewish Life and Community Engagement Sarah Rapaport organized a free workshop at the Upper School providing resources and best practices for classroom Holocaust education March 2. This event, meant for English and History teachers in the Southern California area, aimed to equip educators with the knowledge required to teach a critical and sensitive subject with historical integrity and empathy.
As a part of the workshop, Price and Rapaport hosted a Holocaust survivor, Eva Pearlman, who recounted the story of her miraculous survival by hiding in France. The Los Angeles Holocaust Museum provided resources for faculty in attendance about Holocaust curricula as well as time for educators who attended to collaborate amongst each other educators.
Rapaport said the event was successful in supplying educators with Holocaust education resources, and the event emphasized how to effectively teach the topic within the time constraints of a class period.
“Price and I offered a lot of different ideas on ways to incorporate Holocaust education, in particular within humanities courses,” Rapaport said. “We also tried to focus on time-saving strategies since one of the pre-event surveys of participants indicated that the biggest challenge they face when teaching the Holocaust is having enough time to cover the dense material appropriately. I plan to hold this type of event again next year and will re-examine how we can most effectively use the time we have for the sessions.”
Rapaport said her main goal was to have participants understand the Holocaust within the broader historical context of antisemitism and to underscore the importance of teaching larger contextual themes related to the genocide.
“A major part of teaching the Holocaust is understanding not only Jewish history but general world history,” Rapaport said. “The Holocaust didn’t happen out of nowhere. Teaching about it effectively requires one to understand how Jewish communities living in the diaspora ended up in Europe, their civil and social status prior to the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party and understanding their relationship with neighbors as a marginalized people in various countries throughout Eastern Europe, as well as the history of anti-Judaism in medieval Europe. Learning about the Holocaust is important in understanding hate, intolerance, upstander versus bystander behavior and human behavior.”
History Teacher Ingrid Sierakowskisaid she appreciated the resources provided and will incorporate them when teaching the World War ll in her sophomore history class, The Rise of the Modern World.
“The Los Angeles Holocaust Museum shared videos of courageous conversations about the stories of survivors,” Sierakowski said. “I thought the media they shared was particularly engaging because they were animated and student-created, which I believe my students will better absorb the information from. I am planning on recreating this media in a similar way for a classroom activity.”
Sierakowski said the limited time the sophomore history curriculum provides for Holocaust education restricts her ability to teach about the genocide.
“There are so many conversations to be had about the Holocaust, but because of the amount of time that we have, I can’t go as in- depth [as I can]with topics I have a whole unit to cover,” Sierakowski said.
History Teacher Jennifer Golub-Marcus said the event helped her refine her approach to Holocaust education to focus on personal stories of survival in a chronological manner.
“As a teacher, sometimes I’m just scrambling together resources, but the organization of the resources they provided gave me ideas about how to use the survivors’ testimony within an interactive timeline,” Marcus said. “These resources are not only about the history we study, but they are deeply personal and moving stories about family histories. Teaching about the resilience of a family unit is key to understanding how families survived but most likely didn’t end up intact because a third of all European Jews perished during the Holocaust.”
Marcus said she believes the quality of historical Jewish education would improve if the school had more standardized expectations for teaching content.
“Holocaust education is a California state requirement, and teaching the Holocaust is not just about the time of the war between 1933 to 1945 but rather a broader contextual understanding,” Marcus said. “I don’t think we do the best job as a school to meet the state requirement. There are benchmarks of understanding and inflection points, particularly 19th century Jewish history, [that] the History Department needs to collectively decide are important to teach.”
