Passing on the baton of memory
V IN SUMMER Habonim-Dror will be returning to Holland for its Sayarim camp for year-10s after a Covid-enforced break for the previous two years.
The two-week programme is dedicated to Shoah education and is, according to the youth movement’s mazkira, Katie Felstein from Manchester, “the highest rated of all our camps”.
While children may have learned the basic facts about the Nazi genocide as part of the national history curriculum in schools, this is a more intensive experience with a particular focus on the difficult choices and dilemmas faced by people at the time.
More than 50 teenagers have already signed up for this year’s scheme, which will include a trip to Westerbork, site of the transit camp where the Nazis transported Jews to the East. Each year, the participants will perform The Conscience Play, written by TV producer and Habonim alumnus Dan Patterson, which is “about having a conscience and not being a bystander,” Ms Felstein said.
Members of Dror, which was founded in Poland, fought in the most famous act of Jewish military resistance against the Germans, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.
“We run an amazing activity on this every year on Sayarim and it really connects to the participants as it is their movement ancestors who were actively a part of it,” she said. “This always gives the kids a lot of inspiration and really adds to the feeling of youth empowerment that we try to instil in our participants.
“Two of our leaders, Theo Freeman and Jonah Baron-Cohen, actually wrote a song about it on summer camp [in Dorset] last August called Warsaw Ghetto, which is being released on Spotify soon and tells the story of the Uprising.”
A graduate of a Jewish school, Ms Felstein acknowledges that “sometimes it feels easy to become desensitised if you grow up hearing so much” about the Holocaust. But Sayarim tries to approach it in a way that enables teenagers to relate it to their own Jewish identity.
It is natural to worry about fadingmemories as events recede further into the past. But Neil Martin, chief executive of the Jewish Lads and Girls Brigade and chairman of Yom Hashoah UK, believes the Jewish community has become “more acutely aware” of maintaining the legacy of remembrance.
Yom Hashoah, which was instituted in Israel close to the anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising — it broke out on the eve of Pesach — was little noticed in the UK a decade ago, he said. Thousands, however, watched the central online ceremony here last year and more than 20,000 lit yellow memorial candles.
He was one of barely a dozen UK participants on the annual March of the Living in Poland in 2010. This year 260 will be going from Britain, the majority aged from 19 to 35 (and there would have been more if organisers had not capped numbers because of Covid).
“The way young people remember and interact may be different, as the Holocaust moves away from living memory,” he said, “but the outcome of remembering and caring as a community is strong within the next generation.”
Charlotte Agran, the new director of informal education at RSY-Netzer, who previously worked with the Holocaust Educational Trust, said movement workers participating in March of the Living this year were planning to start working on how to improve Holocaust education on their return.
The movement’s policy document recognised “the unique and fundamental significance of the Shoah,” she noted. “As the Holocaust moves further into history and Holocaust survivors become fewer and frailer, RSY-Netzer recognises that they are the last generation to hear the first-hand testimony of survivors and it will be their responsibility to ensure the memory of the Holocaust lives on.”
At cross-communal
JCoSS, as well as a wholeschool assembly on Yom Hashoah next week, students in years 7 to 10 will have the option of coming out of normal lesson for a special programme. The grandson of the late survivor Freddie Knoller who teaches at the school will be one of the speakers, as will be another member of staff whose father was on the Kindertransport; Mr Knoller died in January aged 100.
“We are using staff to tell their family story,” said Debbie Juggler, director of Jewish learning at JCoSS.
Apart from history, pupils learn about the Holocaust in Jewish studies, particularly in year 9 where the curriculum is about the theme of leadership.
“We try to understand the Shoah through looking at individual stories,” Ms Juggler said. “I think the more our students realise that the victims of the Shoah had dreams and aspirations like they do, the more relatable it is.
“We look at the role that different Jewish leaders played within the context of the Shoah — leaders of resistance movements such as Mordechai Anielewicz and Roza Robota, or Adam Czerniakow and Mordechai Rumkowski as leaders of the Judenrat,” she said.
“It is only when looking at these individual stories as well as survivor testimony do our students begin to understand that there is no one experience or reaction that defines our understanding of the Shoah but that it is actually a complex part of Jewish and international history.”
Besides an optional sixthform trip to Poland — suspended for the previous two years because of Covid — the school has run trips there also for parents.
If figures are anything to go by, then the 75 per cent of year-12s who will be going on JFS’s trip to Poland in July represent an impressive number.
Sharon Krieger, a religious education teacher at the school for more than 30 years who has run many of its Holocaust education programmes, notes that pupils have less personal connection to the subject than previous generations.
“They don’t have grandparents who lived through it or know others whose grandparents did,”she said. Therefore schools are having to work harder to engage children “because they are the last generation who will see a survivor” and yet they “have got a bigger responsibility to pass on [the memory] to their children”.
“What we’ve had to do is to find out what aspects are the most relevant,” she said. “We have done a lot about Holocaust denial because that is a phenomenon they encounter on places like TikTok. We want to give them the skills to challenge and debate.”
The school has been developing more resources, looking at such topics as boycotting goods from Germany or whether it was right to use the medical information gained from experiments on concentration camp victims.
Given that videos are a prime source of information for teenagers on social media today, there is also a need for more audio-visual material. One JFS workshop, for example, looks at the Holocaust through film.
Over the years, Ms Krieger said, the school has talked more about other groups who were victims of the Nazis — “Gypsies, homosexuals, those with mental disabilities, so students get a much fuller picture.”
When children see the example of a TV personality such as Robert Rinder, who has made documentaries on the Shoah, that helps to encourage interest. “The kids know who he is,” she said. (His sister, as it happens, went to JFS).
Yavneh College students were in Poland last term for their Holocaust education trip, where they saw firsthand Ukrainian refugees seeking shelter from the conflict — and joined in efforts to collect aid.
Rabbi Andrew Davis, Yavneh’s executive director of Jewish life, believes the internet may have helped pupils to access more information about the Holocaust. “I would say that our students today are at least as interested and possibly even more interested than in the past,” he said.
They are the last generation who will see a survivor
There is no one reaction that defines our understanding of the Shoah