NEW YORK - Six decades later, the Holocaust remains a painful and emotionally draining topic — and a special challenge for middle school and high school teachers who have to instruct students about one of the most horrific episodes in human history.
Despite its importance, Holocaust scholarship is just beginning to work its way into history lessons in much of the country, and teachers volunteering to tackle the subject often find themselves developing courses from scratch, without much formal training.
“My own education about the Holocaust was not close to what I am providing today in my classroom,” said Kimberly Watkin, a history teacher in South Burlington, Vt., who offered her high school’s first full-term course on the Holocaust this past school year.
To become better versed in her subject matter, Miss Watkin joined about 30 other educators from 11 states, plus Croatia, Lithuania and Poland, at a five-day program on the Holocaust at Columbia University last week.
It was sponsored by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which began in 2000 to bring schoolteachers from across the country to seminars with top historians as part of a campaign to improve teaching about Holocaust.
“More often than not, you’ll find that students are introduced to the Holocaust by an English teacher who wants them to read Anne Frank’s diary,” said the foundation’s executive vice president, Stanlee J. Stahl.
“We did this because we discovered that teachers did not know the history,” she said.
Established in 1986, the foundation’s primary mission is to provide financial aid to non-Jews who risked arrest and execution to rescue Jews during World War II. It offers care to about 1,500 surviving rescuers around the globe.
But last week, it offered teachers lectures on the development of the Nazi regime, life under German occupation, the role of industry in the Holocaust, the efforts of rescuers and the machinery of the system that killed 6 million Jews.
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