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Sharing life in the shadow of death
By Marilyn Henry
(May 1) -- Yad Layeled, the Children's Holocaust Museum of Beit Lohamei Hageta'ot, has created a unique program for Holocaust education that pairs Israeli and American students --
Hundreds of pupils this year are worried about Alex.
Only 11, Alex is left alone with his pet mouse, Snow, to struggle, scavenge, and hide while Nazi soldiers hunt for Jews in an unnamed, annihilated ghetto in Poland.
Terrified, hungry. and cold, as the seasons pass he rejects two serendipitous chances to flee, because he vowed to wait for his father to return from a roundup of Jews.
Alex's world is brilliantly portrayed in The Island on Bird Street, a children's novel by Uri Orlev, the award-winning Israeli author and survivor, now at the heart of a unique project in Holocaust education.
In an experimental program developed by Yad Layeled, the Children's Holocaust Museum of Beit Lohamei Hageta'ot - The Ghetto Fighters' House, seventh-grade classes in 20 Israeli schools are being "twinned" with American Jewish and public schools.
Over a year, they simultaneously study the Holocaust. Linked by e-mail, a common curriculum, schedule, artistic projects. and journals, they read Orlev's novel, learning history and values, and become friends in the process.
"Usually when you talk about the Holocaust, you talk about death," said Beit Lohamei Hageta'ot director Simcha Stein. "Here, for the first time, we are talking about life in the shadow of death. This is a completely different approach to Holocaust education.
"We are trying to teach the younger generation about life," Stein said. "We also are trying to teach about children without a childhood."
The literary and technology partnership is called "The International Book-Sharing Project," a multi-teacher, bicultural, binational project that is run through the "virtual classroom" at the Janusz Korczak International School at Yad Layeled, in western Galilee.
Korczak (Henryk Goldszmit) was an educator who accompanied the children of his orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka in August 1942. Yad Layeled is dedicated to the memory of the 1.5 million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust.
"It is not just a project where you pick up a book and teach it," said Beth Dotan, one of the Yad Layeled coordinators of the project at Beit Lohamei Hageta'ot. "It extends into the lives of these children in a lot of ways."
THE PROGRAM has ambitious goals. It not only teaches about the Holocaust, creating an opportunity to discuss personal, communal, and national values. It also teaches tolerance, sensitivity and the consequences of indifference, develops an understanding of the capacity for good and evil, and cultivates an appreciation for the centrality of the existence of the state of Israel in light of the Holocaust. It also aims to provide American and Israeli pupils with the opportunity to form relationships and learn more about each other.
The project is a collaborative effort involving scholars, historians, classroom and museum educators, and administrators in two countries. It also involves Orlev, who has visited students in both Israeli and American schools.
A school, of course, could develop a meaningful method to teach Orlev's - or another Holocaust - book on its own. However the Yad Layeled educators say it is extremely valuable for the Israeli and American students to learn together.
"We believe that the story of the Holocaust can be a meeting place for all Jews and for pupils from different countries and cultures," said Moshe Shner, director of the Pedagogical Center at Beit Lohamei Hageta'ot.
"The war separates people, but the memory of children in the Holocaust can bring them together."
The idea that pupils share the same book gives the learning a unique perspective, he said. And discussing the book with people from different cultures enhances the students' education.
"The building of an international community of learning becomes a unique experience of its own," Shner said.
The Island on Bird Street is ideal for the program, educators say. It is based on fact and presents an authentic picture of a ghetto experience that is written for children, and doesn't traumatize them.
The book also appeals to pupils because it is a suspenseful personal story of the resistance and survival of a boy who is the same age as they are. Alex's choices and activities are ripe for meaningful discussions.
The book is also available in both Hebrew and English, enabling pupils to read it in their primary language.
HOLOCAUST education is required in most of the American states. But the teaching is uneven; it differs in focus, ideology, structure, breadth, and expectations. At times, the best of intentions fall short. When the entire responsibility rests for Holocaust education on a lone teacher, and is not connected to other classes and disciplines, there are overwhelming pressures on the teacher and delicate problems with the pupils' work.
That was the experience of Karen Shawn, who began using Orlev's book and discussing the Holocaust in the early 1990s when she was an English teacher in a public school in Lawrence, New York.
"There were purely factual errors that went uncontested except for my red-penciled comments on their papers," Shawn wrote in article for the forthcoming book Teaching Holocaust Literature, edited by Samuel Totten.
"For example, in writing about our response today to the Holocaust, Laura, gentle and earnest, wrote, 'We should be sensitive to other nations and religions such as the Japanese who were also persecuted during the Holocaust.'"
Changing those misconceptions through the Yad Layeled program requires a substantial commitment from schools, pupils, and parents. In addition to having computers and Internet access on site, the schools must recognize that this is not a simple reading project. It requires a team, including language, history, and arts teachers. The arts projects bring in the parents, at minimum, to transport their children and materials.
The pupils' art projects are exhibited at Yad Layeled, and the children can see them on display while on family trips to Israel.
Imagine, Shawn said: "They travel halfway around world and take parents into a museum and there is their exhibit."
While the Israeli and American pupils have much in common - especially in the music and movies they like - they have very different approaches to and understandings of Orlev's book, educators say.
The American Jewish pupils' approach reflects their traditional Jewish upbringing and education.
"When [Orlev] said he didn't even know what it meant to be Jewish, the kids in the day schools said: 'How could he not know he was Jewish? That's the most important thing for him to know,'" Dotan said.
"The American kids have a Jewish identity in a different way than the Israeli students. The Israeli pupils would talk more about [Orlev's] adventures rather than pointing out that he didn't know he was Jewish."
ORLEV'S autobiography, The Sandgame, is the central work on exhibit in the main hall of Yad Layeled, which had been developing a book-sharing project as Shawn was planning a similar program in the US. When they began to coordinate, despite goodwill and common interests, there were many kinks to be worked out.
"The Israelis wanted to focus on Holocaust history; we, literature. They wanted to begin with a few pupils; we wanted to involve all 90 of ours," wrote Shawn, who now is assistant principal at the Moriah School, a yeshiva in Englewood, New Jersey.
"Many of their pupils did not have advanced English skills; ours lacked advanced Hebrew. They wanted the book taught as a class novel; we felt pupils should read independently and keep daily journals. They wanted to begin in the fall; we, in the spring."
In its first four years, an estimated 5,000 American pupils - both in Jewish day schools and in public schools - have gone through the project. This year, 20 Israeli junior-high schools are paired with Jewish day schools and public schools in the US. Shawn's Moriah, a Zionist yeshiva, is paired with the School for the Arts in Tel Aviv.
Next year the number of Israeli schools will jump to 30, bringing the total number of participating schools to 60. There is a short waiting list of other schools that want to participate.
Some schools get priority for admission into the program because of local circumstances. One is in suburban Chicago where a local teacher, who had taken a seminar in Holocaust education, contacted Beit Lohamei Hageta'ot.
"He wanted desperately to be in the program because he felt there was too much antisemitism growing around his area and he wanted his pupils to approach this subject in the right way," said Dotan. "We immediately took him because it is an important message that he is trying to send."
Yad Layeled has also invited high schools to join the project, using the writings of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.
When the twinned American school is a public school, "we try to make our Israeli pupils aware and sensitive to the fact that the pupils at the other side may be non-Jewish, and therefore we try to adopt a more universal approach to the learning process," Shner said.
THE CLASSES bond . Twenty-five pupils from Haifa came to the US earlier this year to spend a few days with the partner class at a Jewish school in Nassau County, New York. One New Jersey boy, planning his bar mitzva in Israel, invited the Israeli partner class.
"There is an excitement that is generated from the first e-mail, and they anticipate some response from pupils they never met but feel a kinship with," said Shawn, a consultant for Beit Lohamei Hageta'ot and also on the staff of the Yad Vashem summer institute for educators from abroad.
The Sulam Tzor Regional Middle School, located north of Beit Lohamei Hageta'ot, earlier this year exchanged its first class letter with its partner American public school, the Beveridge Junior High School in Omaha, Nebraska. Then there were rocket attacks from Lebanon, and the children were sent into the shelters for a week.
"All in the same letter, the questions were: 'What was it like to sit in the shelter? Did the bombs stop falling on you? Do you still like the music of so-and-so?'
"Those were the questions from Omaha because the kids in Sulam Tzor were writing about the music they loved and the movies they like to see, and the kinds of clothes that they wear," Dotan said.
"And then the [Israeli] kids wrote, 'Well, we are sitting in the bomb shelters, but don't worry - we will be out in a week.'"
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