A Fraught Legacy       

How do we teach the Holocaust to a generation so removed from the past?

They have to know what happened.”

“We can never forget.”

“Children today are so coddled. They need to appreciate how lucky they are, and what some Yidden endured for being Jewish.”

“If my grandmother could go through Auschwitz as a teenager, how can my teenager be too young to hear about Auschwitz?”

“Teaching about the kedoshim keeps their memory alive — how can we forget their lives and deaths?”

These perspectives sound all too familiar to parents and educators who are given the task of educating our children about the darkest period of the past century, the Holocaust.

“I have two kinds of students in my classroom who need pushback when we begin to learn about the Holocaust,” explains Sara Lobell*, a middle-school Bais Yaakov teacher. “There are the girls who lean forward, enthusiastic, and tell me that they love learning about the Holocaust. ‘Are you going to tell us all the details? Is it going to be really scary?’ To them, the Holocaust feels so removed from their lives that they see it as some kind of spooky story, a gory tale.”

The second kind of student has the opposite reaction. “I have girls who raise their hands and ask if they can leave if they’re uncomfortable, who say that they’re afraid they’ll get nightmares, who will even ask their parents to call the school and be excused from the unit.”

Complex questions arise as the years go on. Can children really relate to the Churban of Europe, 80  years on? Will they be traumatized by learning about the horrors? And don’t today’s kids have enough stress in their lives, with an uptick in anti-Semitism and a barrage of frightening and sometimes graphic news from Eretz Yisrael? Do we really need to pile on the fear?