By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
On a recent June morning, a cohort of teacher-leaders and facilitators from across Kentucky gathered at the Trager Family JCC for the 13th and final workshop organized by the UK-JHF Holocaust Education Initiative.
Like previous editions, the all-day workshop was designed around a central theme. Here it was titled “The Stories We Tell: Understanding the Holocaust through Art, Literature, Film, and Primary Sources.”
There were sessions adopting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum teaching guidelines, exploring poems and drawings created by children in the Terezin concentration camp, discussing various contexts of antisemitism, and more. Alice Goldstein, a Holocaust survivor who lives in Lexington and often speaks to school groups, participated via Zoom.
“Our goal during this workshop is to support effective and ethical teaching of the Holocaust in Kentucky K-12 schools in conjunction with the 2018 Ann Klein and Fred Gross Holocaust Education Act,” a participant guide explained. “We will work together to achieve this goal, recognizing this as an opportunity to learn from and listen to one another as we support this initiative.”
The overriding imperative, the guide emphasized, was “to cultivate an environment of learning, curiosity, inquiry, experimentation, and openness.”
Responding to needs raised by the 2018 Act – in which the Kentucky legislature mandated Holocaust education in public schools but which didn’t provide concurrent funding – 2021 saw the launch of a collaboration between the University of Kentucky and the Louisville-based Jewish Heritage Fund. The Jewish Federation of Louisville’s Ida and Bernhard Behr Holocaust Memorial Education Fund has also provided multiple grants to support this initiative.
“The teacher is the greatest variable influencing the quality of Holocaust education and effectiveness in the prevention of antisemitism,” a mission statement emphasizes, calling the project “a nationally recognized teacher-focused model that fosters teacher-led, community-rooted, inquiry-based Holocaust pedagogy and education about antisemitism.
“Our model invests deeply in educators,” the Initiative—not as one-time participants in a program, but as catalysts for transformational change.” UK professor Janice Fernheimer directs the initiative.
A similar cooperative dynamic was evident all through this particular Tuesday. “We’re not here trying to convince each other (about) things,” said Joshua Lane, a workshop facilitator from Jefferson County Public Schools. “We’re just trying to listen and learn as much as we can from one other, to reflect, and give others the benefit of the doubt – so listen with curiosity and openness.”
Then it was time to delve into essential specifics, so teachers would be better equipped to connect with middle and high school students on this thorniest of subjects.
“First things first, you’re going to define the term ‘Holocaust,’” Lane told her colleagues. “What does it even mean? It’s a loaded word that has a lot of emotion in it. So to start any instruction, any unit, any lesson plan that you’re going on with the Holocaust, you have to clearly define what it is, what it was, how it functioned and how it affects us today.”
Then came the crux of Lane’s précis.
“The Holocaust was not an inevitable event,” he said. “It wasn’t something that had to happen for history. The Holocaust happened because individual groups and governments made choices to act or to remain passive. There are people who just stood by and watched. There were perpetrators, victims and bystanders – and by the actions of those people, that’s how the Holocaust happened.”
No matter the context, “avoid simple answers to complex questions,” Lane urged. “The Holocaust resulted from many political, social and historical factors,” he said. “You can’t just say, ‘Well, it’s because of the Nazis.”
One workshop participant, who teaches in Bullitt County public schools, compared Holocaust classwork to his experience discussing the causes of the Civil War.
“We have a very low African-American population, and in my first year I had one African-American kid – a great kid, awesome kid,” who thought it was almost all because of slavery,” the teacher recalled. “I was trying to teach them about (the issue of) state’s rights and how recently the U.S. had had someone controlling them when they were colonies – and he was having a really hard time.
“We had a discussion about it,” the teacher recalled, “and I was trying not to come off as racist, being a white teacher in an almost all-white room.” Regardless, “he had a hard time relating to other causes.”
Along similar lines, there were further admonitions to “strive for precision of language,” said Catherine Holmes, another JCPS-based facilitator. “Words do matter. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones’ – well, words can also hurt. And you must understand that ‘prejudice’ is not the same as ‘discrimination,’; ‘concentration camps’ (are not the same as) ‘killing centers.’”
Holmes spoke further about distinguishing between “resistance” and “survival.”
“Resistance, as I told my students, is not always getting out there with guns and fighting and protesting outwardly,” she said. “Sometimes resistance is quiet, and we’re going to learn about that today — and that resistance is more than just survival. So strive to balance perspectives that inform your study of the Holocaust.”
Just as important, “strive to talk about (survivors/resistors) as people before the Holocaust,” because “sometimes this is the first introduction students have to Jewish culture.”
As the morning continued, there were admonitions to “avoid romanticizing history – you don’t want to overshadow the reality of what happened,” Lane said. The Holocaust “was brutal. It was savage. That’s just the truth of it, so be honest.” That much said, beware of elements, such as photographs, film – even descriptions of the cramped, claustrophobic confines of Anne Frank’s Secret Annex — that may trigger trauma responses among some students.
Visual imagery, too, can be valuable jumping-off points for classroom discussion. Workshop participants were shown a photograph of the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach, where the centerpiece is a vast bronze sculpture depicting an outstretched arm – tattooed with an Auschwitz number – rising out of a mass of Holocaust victims.
“Would it have made a difference if it were not in Florida?” with its large Jewish population, asked Kristy Whatley, a facilitator from Fayette County public schools.
“It could have, absolutely,” someone piped up. Maybe it mattered whether one viewed the sculpture in close-up, or from a distance. Observation is not the same as interpretation.
“Any kid in your class can tell you what they notice about this sculpture,” Whatley said. “But as a teacher, I know how you’re all reacting. I know what questions you have. I know what grammar you have for understanding how sculptures are made and communicate a message…so when you’re thinking about introducing kids to Holocaust content, you really want to think about activities that will let you know how they react to this imagery.”
Crucially, Whatley stressed, “I want you all to think how Holocaust education is more than just the facts that we know.” Always remember, she said, “to understand why it is so critical when we ask, especially young students that maybe don’t have as many entry points, to be able to teach responsibly about the Holocaust.”
A workshop segment on antisemitism acknowledged how the word can allude to multiple attitudes, exchanges on the meaning of “Jewish identity” and UK facilitator Danielle Willard-Kyle’s observation that “Jews make up just two percent of the global population, yet they’ve been the epicenter for many of history’s extreme hatreds.”
There was considerable treatment of those historical circumstances, and how classroom discussions can range beyond nominally “Jewish studies” contexts. Stereotypes can become tropes (“Jews love money”) – and even the expression “Wandering Jew” can bear negative connotations, such as UK’s David Moscowitz’s example:
“‘We don’t want Jews farming the land – what are they going to do to our crops and our food supply? We need to get them off our land; let’s make sure they’re in the cities.’”
The workshop included four 90-minute break-out sessions. In the morning participants could choose between “Terezin: Art, Poetry and Testimony” and “Teaching the Holocaust Through Film. In the afternoon the choices were “Using Poetry to Respond to Hard Histories” and “Teaching with Primary Sources: Warsaw Ghetto Archive.”
Within the context of film and media, “antisemitism is always driven by narrative,” Moscowitz said, launching a discussion that referenced the 1978 NBC-TV miniseries “Holocaust” – “one of the first big, visible instances we get of seeing the Holocaust brought up in mainstream culture,” Moscowitz pointed out.
Later in the day, during the Warsaw Ghetto” segment (focusing on the Oyneg Shabes archive that ghetto residents compiled in secret), facilitators Holmes and Willard-Kyle pondered a core issue: “What is resistance? How would you define it? What can you bear witness through documents?”
It was, to be sure, a very full day, reflecting the immensity of its subject. There was also continuing affirmation about sharing insight with the next generation.
Among the day’s participants with in was Laura Wilmington-Richée, a sixth-grade Teacher-Leader for Holocaust Studies at the Academy@Shawnee. She and her husband, Kamarr Richée — a science teacher at the Home of the Innocents Weinberg Academy — are parents of a 13-year-old son and a 16-year-old daughter.
“We’re actually going to Poland this summer, because our children want to go,” Wilmington-Richée said afterward.
How familiar are those teens with the Holocaust? “Our 16-year-old is very aware,” her father said, describing his daughter as “a pretty astute and politically minded individual who chooses to read for herself and think for herself.” His son “has some ideas and concepts” about the subject, and as he gets older “we hope to help him think larger than just the social context you oftentimes have as a 13-year-old boy.”
Wilmington-Richée, a California native who was introduced to the Holocaust when her 8th grade class visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C.. She was especially moved by an exhibit of shoes taken from arrivals to the Majdanek extermination camp in Lublin, Poland, before they were sent to the gas chambers.
“It really got to me,” Wilmington-Richée recalled, “so I started digging into the Holocaust, trying to understand how something so terrible could happen.”