Education

 

RESOURCES for TEACHING about the Holocaust, Rescuers, and Antisemitism

The best books about rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust       https://shepherd.com/best-books/rescuers-of-jews-during-the-holocaust

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum       https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/en

Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem         https://www.yadvashem.org/

Facing History and Ourselves                 https://www.facinghistory.org/

Highly Recommended Documentaries

The Number on Great Grandfather’s Arm (2018) https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/the-number-on-great-grandpas-arm  This is a short video produced by HBO and is free. It’s an excellent overview of the Holocaust suitable for children and adults. A great grandson interviews his grandfather about the Holocaust. It is beautifully done and very informative. I would recommend this for every grade level starting in 5th grade. Adult children of Holocaust survivors also were very moved by this documentary. This documentary packs a lot into 20 minutes.

Karski and the Lords of Humanity by Slawomir Grunberg. (2015) This is the story of Jan Karski, a  Polish underground courier who traveled across occupied Europe infiltrating the Warsaw Ghetto an Nazi transit camps to deliver eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to the Allied  powers. This documentary combines archival footage with animated sequences including interviews with Karski.  Available on Amazon Prime.

Who Will Write Our History, directed by Roberta  Grossman (2019) is available though Amazon Prime and is also a very compelling, well crafted with original footage mixed with dramatization. This is their description:  “In November 1940, days after the Nazis sealed 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a secret band of journalists, scholars, and community leaders decided to fith back. Known by the code name Oyneg Shabes, this clandestine group vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda not by guns or fists but with the ultimate weapon: the truth.”

Paper Clips  Description on Amazon: ” an inspiring 2004 documentary about a consciousness-raising project that blossomed into something beautiful at a rural Tennessee school. When the principal of Whitwell Middle School sought a program that would teach diversity to a predominantly white, Protestant student body, the notion of focusing on the Holocaust–specifically Hitler’s extermination of six million Jews–seemed like an obvious way to go. But understanding what “six million” looks like became a challenge. Thus was born the idea of collecting that number of paper clips at Whitwell as a visual reference.”

 

 

Words of Mark Twain, who in 1899 wrote the following in his essay – Concerning The Jews. 
“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one-quarter of one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. The Jew ought hardly be heard of, but he is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine are also out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world in all ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. The Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded and passed away; the Greeks and Romans followed, made a vast noise, and they were gone. Other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now and have vanished. The Jew saw them all, survived them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert but aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jews; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

 

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