YAD VASHEM

The reason for our recent excursion to Israel was to attend a two week seminar at The International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem. Our school entered into a partnership with Yad Vashem to develop a K - 12 curriculum that will provide an academically rigorous yet age appropriate program for teaching the Holocaust. This was an outstanding opportunity for the working group to come together on the Yad Vashem campus and begin our project.

Yad Vashem was established in 1953 as the world center of documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust. The campus sits on a sprawling forested area about a twenty minute drive from central Jerusalem. Although most tour groups and visitors to Jerusalem are familiar with the impressive museum, Yad Vashem is much more. The archive is a world renowned depository of material addressing the Perpetrators, Victims, By-Standers and Rightest Amongst the Nations of the Shoah. Original documents from Nazi and Jewish sources, photographs, films, artifacts and survivor testimony make up the archive. A virtual who's who of Holocaust scholars are, or have been, associated with Yad Vashem: Friedlander, Bauer, Browning, Lipstadt, Bankier, Gilbert, the list is endless.

Our seminar group consisted of forty-six educators from California, Florida, NY, Australia, Sweden and Israel. Throughout the two week period we received a mix of subject matter (history, literature etc.) and pedagogical lectures and workshops from Yad Vashem staff and visiting scholars. We also toured the museum and had access to the visual center.

The museum is impressive. The architecture and displays were planned to stimulate your senses and mind. This is not a walk though large rooms with pictures and artifacts hanging on the wall. By the end of a tour, you are physically tired and mentally drained. The group enters the building and views a kaleidoscope of archived still and film images of pre-Holocaust Jewish life on a large triangular wall. As you turn to move to the next section, the floor is actually built on a slight down slope. You, the visitor, are now moving down in to the story. The rise of Nazism is eerily displayed with the actual large red banners with swastikas that hung on many buildings in Europe during the war and an original copy of Mein Kampf amongst many other documents and pictures. The era of tactics of legality and social isolation of the German Jewish population is laid out with historical clarity. Jumping ahead to the museum section presenting the 1939 time frame, with the invasion of Poland, the displays are placed closer together and more visually intimidating. Ghettoization is displayed: The museum is now cramped. The downward slope of the floor is more apparent with the Operation Barbarossa (German invasion of the USSR) display. The lighting is darker. Horrendous pictures of Einsatzgruppen operations are displayed. The sense of speed and confusion is imparted as the walls of the museum displays are placed at odd spots that obstruct your ability to walk though in a straight line. Some of our seminar-mates spoke of a sense of claustrophobia at this point in the tour. The Goring Memorandum explanation, Wansee Conference, pictures and short biographies of the perpetrators are on the walls... the proverbial door is closed, the area seems darker now, Operation Reinhard, it's crowded, something catches my eye and I look up: it's a very modern, stainless steel art piece of a spiders web, turn the corner and an enormous deportation list blocks the way, we all knew what was coming, something felt different under my feet, I'm standing on a railroad track, around the corner from the deportation list....a box car, to the left the infamous sign from Auschwitz-I: Arbeit Macht Frei, a huge picture of the gate to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, quiet.....sobs.....liberation displays, the floor is on an up-slope now, WW-II ends, Nuremberg Trials, up more, finally out of the museum to a deck over looking a beautiful view of the Jerusalem Forest... bright sun. It is possibly the most psychologically constructed museum I have ever visited. In my opinion: it's brilliant.

The Learning Center is a must see if ever on the Yad Vashem campus. It is a very modern circular room with computer stations throughout. Seventeen poignant and difficult questions appear on the screens and the walls of the room. The student, seated at individual computer stations, can click on one of these questions and a page opens with video statements from some of the best minds on Holocaust studies discussing the questions. For example, the question of how a human being from a modern European country became a killer during the Holocaust is discussed by Drs. Browning and Bankier. Each with slightly different theses. "Why didn't the allies bomb Auschwitz? Drs. Bauer, Lipstadt and Bankier provide their theses on this emotional topic. The theological question of: Where was God during the Shoah? is addressed by rabbis and theological scholars. Possibility one of the most intellectually stimulating opportunities of my stay. After leaving the learning center, the discussions (some heated) amongst the class lasted well in to the evening.

A very good experience for all the participants. Having opportunity to study and attend lectures in an academic environment is always a pleasure. We all look forward to sinking our teeth into the Holocaust curriculum project and making it the benchmark for secondary education in the US.