2006 Holocaust & Jewish Resistance Teachers Program
On July 6th, 29 teachers from across the United States will meet in Newark, NJ, and after a brief orientation, the group will be traveling for three weeks, first in Poland, and then in Israel. They will be participating in this year’s summer seminar of the internationally acclaimed Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers Program, founded in 1984.
To date, the program has nearly 800 alumni. Many of them are active in Holocaust education in public school classrooms, as well as in community commemorations, educational endeavors, and in-service and other training to assist their fellow teachers. Many have been participants in local, statewide, national and international conferences that include a focus on the Holocaust and Jewish resistance in its many forms. The alumni, in communities across the country, reach tens of thousands of secondary school students across the United States.
In Poland, the group will be in Warsaw, Lublin and Krakow, hearing lectures at a number of institutions, with visits to Jewish historic sites, museums, former ghettoes and death camps, such as Majdanek, Auschwitz and Birkenau.
In Israel, the teachers will be studying with prominent scholars and hear first-hand testimony from survivors at the Yad Vashem Research and Documentation Center in Jerusalem, and at the Ghetto Fighters Study Center at Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot. Among the founders of the kibbutz were many Holocaust survivors.
The goals of the program, and in specific our summer seminars, are to advance Holocaust education in U.S. secondary schools, to deepen teachers' knowledge and strengthen their ability to implement Holocaust studies in their classrooms, and to teach each new generation about the Holocaust and Jewish resistance in all of its forms. This is being done so that students will know and understand what happened during those shattering years, and to further educational activities which use the lessons of the past as warnings for the present, and the future.
The summer seminar’s curriculum includes martyrdom and the struggle for survival in Jewish history, Jewish life in pre-war Europe, as well as life during the Holocaust years. Also explored are life in the ghettoes and camps, the Final Solution, reaction of the `free world’, post-war impact of the Holocaust, and the Holocaust in literature and art.
This program is sponsored by the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Educators Chapter of the Jewish Labor Committee. It receives generous support from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Atran Foundation, the Gruss Life Monument Funds, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.