Holocaust educators say mandatory education can make a difference

 

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This story was written for the August 2021 edition of Jewish Rhode Island of Providence:

Holocaust education can play a major role in making both students and adults more aware of the Holocaust, say two educators with experience in the field.
Paula Olivieri, the education coordinator of the Sandra Bornstein Holocaust Education Center at the Jewish Community Center in Providence, said the legislation passed recently by the Rhode Island General Assembly to create a permanent commission to promote and continually improve genocide and Holocaust education will go a long way toward making more people aware of the Holocaust.
In an interview, she explained that “since 2016, a consortium formed of interested parties representing the Holocaust, Armenian, African nations and Southeast Asian genocides developed curriculum,” in conjunction with the Department of Education, for teachers in grades 6-12 and put it on the department’s website.
The problem with that approach, she said, was that “the consortium had no official standing in the state (and) no way to enforce the (2016) law. We’re hoping that the commission will be able to do that.”
Asked if she thinks Holocaust education can reduce anti-Semitic incidents in schools similar to the one this spring at Duxbury High School in Massachusetts, where the football team reportedly had been using “Auschwitz” as a term to call football plays for several seasons, she said she’s optimistic that it can.
Olivieri pointed to states such as New Jersey that already mandate Holocaust education as proof that it works. She said in those states “you find that students are more aware of the Holocaust and genocides.”
There are currently 18 states where Holocaust education is required, and there will be 19 in 2022 when Arkansas’ law takes effect, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Another educator, Charlotte Sheer, a retired teacher living in Plymouth, Mass., who founded the Holocaust Stamps Project at the Foxboro Regional Charter School, knows that Holocaust education works, because she educated students about the Holocaust on her own at a time when there were only five states requiring it.
Massachusetts wasn’t one of them, but that didn’t stop Sheer from teaching her students about it. She did that by first introducing her fifth-graders to the Holocaust in 2008 by reading the historical novel “Number the Stars” by Lois Lowry. The book, “set in Nazi-occupied Denmark, led to remarkable conversations about discrimination, bullying, and unfounded hatred, experiences not unfamiliar to some in the class,” Sheer said.
“The supportive educational climate in my culturally diverse school allowed me to undertake an ambitious learning activity which evolved into the Holocaust Stamps Project, the collection of 11 million postage stamps, each honoring one victim of prejudice and hate, 6 million Jews and 5 million from other non-Aryan backgrounds,” she said.
The project was embraced by the entire school, she said.
“For 10, years, students in kindergarten through grade 12 worked together, trimming and counting stamps, and creating 18 stamps collage artworks depicting aspects of the Holocaust. Making children aware of the historical facts opened the door to understanding how destructive prejudice can be,” she said.
Holocaust education is pivotal toward reducing anti-Semitism, she said, because “today’s children are tomorrow’s parents --- and leaders. What is taught in school today provides the foundation for how tomorrow’s adults will conduct their lives and treat each other,” she said.
Recent remarks by adults using the Holocaust to make political points during the pandemic show seem to support Sheer’s comments about why Holocaust education is needed. Two recent incidents --- one national and one locally – illustrate that point.
* Republican Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene in May compared the Nazi’s persecution and murder of 6 million Jews to people being urged or mandated to wear masks during the pandemic, and-or being asked for their COVID-19 vaccination status.
* In July, a Dighton-Rehoboth Regional School Committee member, Katie Ferreira-Aubin of Rehoboth, in social media posts, compared requiring vaccines and vaccine passports to the Holocaust, remarks she defended. “When you explain things in that extreme, it does get people’s attention to kind of say, ‘OK, maybe our freedoms are being taken away right now’. So, sometimes you do have to use extremes to get attention. But I stand by it,” she told WJAR-TV Channel 10 in Providence.
Both the Anti-Defamation League of New England and school Superintendent Anthony Azar, strongly condemned her remarks.
“Comparing public safety measures such as vaccine passports to the #Holocaust is disrespectful, ignorant and trivializes the memories of the 6 million. Apologize and remove these posts Katie Ferreira-Aubin. Dighton-Rehoboth deserves better,” the ADL said in a statement.
Azar told The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro that “it must be made clear that the comments within the social media posts do not reflect the values and beliefs of the Dighton-Rehoboth Regional School District. Our district strives for inclusivity and sensitivity, As a former teacher who has taught about the Holocaust, comparing vaccination requirements to the Holocaust is both reprehensible and unfortunate.”
The educators hope that making Holocaust education mandatory will lead to a reduction of such incidents.