Home Europe / Library / Shul Bulletins / Travels Abroad / Europe / Issues in Teaching the Holocaust: A Gui…

Article

February 1981

Issues in Teaching the Holocaust: A Guide (1981)

Jewish Education Reflections on the Shoah
View The Text

This content is currently available in its original PDF format. As we expand the library, we plan to add a text version as well.

RELATED CONTENT

Assorted

Holocaust Reprint List

D 1 – Transmitting the Teaching of the Holocaust Address; UOJCA Convention 11/30/74 – D 2 – Teaching the Holocaust 4/19/76 – D 3 – A Time to Keep Silent & A Time to Speak Holocaust talk at Adelphi – D 4 – Schools & Graves (The Holocaust & Jewish Education) Yom HaShoah Address 4/17/85 – D 5 – The face of God; Thoughts on the Holocaust – YU students Yom Hashoah Commemoration 5/6/86 – D 6 – YOSSEL RAKOVER SPEAKS TO GOD – HOLOCAUST CHALLENGES TO RELIGIOUS FAITH – ZVI KOLITZ, KTAV PUBLICATIONS, INC., 9/95 – D 7 – HOLOCAUST COMPENSATION FROM THE VINTAGE OF JEWISH LAW AND MORALITY – ALLIANCE ISRAELITE UNIVERSELLE COLLEGE DES ETUDES JUIVES – REPARATION NECESSAIRE, REPARATION IMPOSSIBLE A PROPOS DES SPOLIATIONS FORUM DU DIMANCHE 17 OCTOBRE 1999 – D 7A – HOLOCAUST COMPENSATION FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF JEWISH LAW AND MORALITY – TRADITION, Vol. 35, No. 2, SUMMER 2001
Reflections on the Shoah

Speech

Schools and Grave - The Holocaust and Jewish Education (1985)

"Arbaim shanah akut be'dor" – For forty years our generation struggled to understand the mystery of those fatal years of the Holocaust. Neither our speech nor our silence helped us to uncover the secrets of God or of man. Perhaps we shall have to wait another forty or another four hundred years, or perhaps we shall never be wise enough even to know how to react. But events march on, and history does not permit us the luxury of contemplation. Hence, some reactions began to emerge fairly quickly. The first and enormously significant response to the Holocaust was the political one: the founding of the State of Israel. Powerlessness would never again be considered a Jewish virtue. The desperate struggles of the heroic Jewish fighters in Warsaw and elsewhere were metamorphosed into the pride of statehood and the military confidence of the Israeli Defense Forces. Today, the future of the Jewish people is unthinkable without the State of Israel.Another response has been a holy, compulsive drive to record and testify. We do not want to forget, and we do not want the world to forget. We have resolved to keep the memory of our Kedoshim alive by demonstrations and by meetings such as this. And many of us have undertaken projects of sculpture and art and museums and exhibits to perpetuate the memory of the Six Million. As the years slip by and memory begins to fade, we desperately want to prevent their anguish and blood and cry from being swallowed up by the misty, gaping hole of eternal silence, banished from the annals of man by the Angel of Forgetfulness.The efforts at remembering and reminding must continue. As long as so-called “revisionist historians” deny that the Holocaust occurred; as long as Babi Yar and Buchenwald behind the Iron Curtain contain almost no reference to Jews; as long as it is even conceivable that an American administration, which preaches more compassion for the victim than for the criminal on the domestic front, can see nothing wrong in its Presiden…
Jewish Education Reflections on the Shoah

Article

Teaching the Holocaust (1974)

Last year we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the liberation, marking the end of World War II. This means that a whole new generation has grown into adulthood not having known of the Holocaust from first-hand experience. For them, it is part of history. It is for this generation, and for all future generations, that the teaching of the Holocaust assumes special significance and presents new problems. "History" does have a tendency to tilt backwards into obsolescence and dissolve into irrelevance, and its most poignant lessons thus become lost to us.Yet, in a way, I wonder if it is not too soon to relegate the Holocaust to the past. I question if we have the right to consider the Holocaust as "history."In some subtle ways, the Holocaust seems to be open-ended, and hence not over yet. Many of the consequences of that single traumatic event in Jewish history are still being played out, and it is likely that the history of the next 20 or 50 years will have to be interpreted as reactions, even if long delayed, to the Holocaust. One may legitimately interpret the data of contemporary Jewish events as a radically different form of Holocaust, but Holocaust nonetheless. The rate of intermarriage and wholesale assimilation, despite the minor eddies and counter-currents in the direction of more intensive Jewish practice, are a gloomy indication of the truth of what I am saying. Moreover, we have not paid sufficient attention to "ZPG" (Zero Population Growth), a situation which is making the number of Jews in the world ever smaller relative to world population in general. While the rest of the world has been increasing, Jews have been decreasing. In effect, we are now confronted with the problem of a "preventive Holocaust," by which I mean, not the murder of Jews already alive, but the prevention of Jews from being born. It is less cruel to individuals, of course, but is equally destructive of the Jewish people as a whole.More directly, we cannot yet relax in considering a r…
Jewish Education Reflections on the Shoah