Understanding and Teaching Holocaust Education (original) (raw)
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On open questions in Holocaust education
Inovacije u nastavi, 2021
Even though recent decades have borne witness to an increased educational interest in teaching the Holocaust, academic stances on why the topic should be taught still vary significantly. The aim of this paper is to present teaching interventions that would help educators to navigate through one of the most important open questions in Holocaust education: the question of aims. Three Holocaust-related teaching interventions, which themselves use open questions as the basis for teaching and learning, are presented and analysed. The open questions, as the background, allow the educators to simultaneously shift between various teaching aims. The interventions addressing the question of heroes, victims and bystanders, causal analysis of the Holocaust, and the responsibility of the Allies for the escalation of the Holocaust, are arranged in such a way so as to lead students from their day-today knowledge, through historical concepts, finally ending up addressing more abstract concepts. The analysis draws on literature related to both Holocaust education and the teaching of controversial issues, and covers a range of topics; from practical to more philosophical.
Images. The International Journal of European Film, Performing Arts and Audiovisual Communication, 2011
Holocaust instruction at schools in Israel is the adolescents' encounter with a phenomenon that is unique in the history of mankind, i.e. the destruction of the Jews during World War II as a coordinated attempt to annihilate the Jewish "race". Adolescents are introduced to curricula that include formal instruction of disciplines such as history and literature, as well as informal instruction involving planning and participating in ceremonies, eld trips, study days at Holocaust institutes, the journey to Poland, and volunteer activity on behalf of Holocaust survivors. Holocaust instruction, despite its complexity, o ers the opportunity to encounter the systematic attempt to murder everyone who had Jewish blood owing in his veins. is is an encounter with the world's rst attempted genocide based on racist ideology, rather than religious ideology. Its singularity lies in the all-encompassing intention of its designers and initiators to achieve the complete destruction of all Jews. Despite the long history of persecution of the Jewish people (Graetz, 1954; Hendel, 1950), the act of annihilation by the Nazis was unique in its characteristics-the planning, implementation, scope, execution, and results. All these had never before been seen and therefore had a profound e ect on the Jewish people. e human community as a whole and the Jewish community in particular, have assumed the educational and moral duty to preserve the memory and instill the lessons and values of this inconceivable story, to prevent history from repeating itself. One of the most important means for passing on this memory is by teaching the Holocaust to the younger generation, as this is manifested in curricula in Israel and abroad. e principal hypothesis of this study is that Holocaust instruction in Israel and abroad has the potential to bring about a moral change, and the question is, what is the desired moral change and how is this to be accomplished? e didactic models at schools in Israel and abroad maintain, to varying degrees, formal curricula that impart historical and literary knowledge, alongside informal curricula that constitute a scholastic