Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
‘Preventing the world from contracting amnesia’
Las Vegas teacher Mitchell Kalin visited Israel last summer with Echoes & Reflections (echoesandreflections.org), a partnership of the AntiDefamation League, the USC Shoah Foundation and Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.
The organization was founded in 2005 to help middle and high school teachers more effectively educate students about the Holocaust.
“We talk about the importance of always teaching about anti-Semitism, to provide the background of anti-Semitism and how we get (to the Holocaust),” says Lindsay Friedman, managing director. “You can’t learn about the Holocaust without understanding anti-Semitism, and that’s really a complex thing to teach students.”
Also important is “contextualizing history,” Friedman says, and helping students to understand how conditions and events of the time resulted in the Holocaust.
Choices have consequences
“Our most essential element is teaching the human story,” she says. “It’s critical for students to understand, of course, factual information — the numbers and the global impact of this. But we want to see recognition that these are individuals.
“You talk about 6 million (murdered) and you can’t wrap your head around that,” she says. So, students are encouraged to “talk about families’ lives before the war, what happened during the war, and really connect on a human and emotional level.”
Las Vegas resident Ben Lesser survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau but lost most of his family in the Holocaust. Since 1995, he has been giving talks to young people in an effort to “prevent the world from contracting amnesia.”
Lesser attempts to help students understand how personal choices can have serious consequences, and how decisions and choices were at the foundation of the Holocaust.
Students may at first be interested in learning about “Hitler and the Nazis,” he says, without realizing that “it did not start with killing. It started with hate.”