Teaching about the Holocaust is daunting.
The content is horrific. Sifting through the enormous amount of documentation and information available, to find what’s most appropriate for students, can be overwhelming. And the number of people who lived to share their experiences continues to shrink.
The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh is meeting those challenges head-on, says Daniel Singleton, the center’s education and partnerships associate.
“Our job at the Holocaust Center is to bring local survivor stories into the classroom, to keep their memories alive and so young people can learn from experiences 80, 85 years ago,” Singleton said. “A lot of our work is helping teachers do their job more effectively to make it more approachable to their students.”
Lessons learned from a fellowship this summer by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous will assist in those efforts.
Singleton and Melissa Survinski, a teacher at Hampton Middle School, were among 24 educators from nine states and Poland that earned a fellowship from the foundation. They were the only educators from Pennsylvania to do so.
They participated in a five-day conference in June in Elizabeth, N.J., that provided instruction on how to teach the Holocaust to students.
The seminar is designed to allow teachers to hear lectures from Holocaust education experts, share teaching concepts and develop approaches for introducing the subject matter to students.
“The three primary goals for the JFR’s Summer Institute are to provide teachers with a graduate-level course on antisemitism and the Holocaust, to empower educators to develop pedagogical connections with other teachers, and to equip these teachers with additional resources to bring back to their classrooms,” said JFR Executive Vice President Stanlee Stahl.
That aligns with the mission of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh.
The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, located at Chatham University in Shadyside, has a “novelty factor,” Singleton said, noting that it’s often the first time children can witness artifacts from the Holocaust. He also notes that, for some students, it might be their first time meeting a Jewish person.
When the Center was founded in 1980, there were about 360 survivors living locally, Singleton said. Now, there’s about 13.
“The number of people who were around who can testify to what they saw firsthand is getting smaller. So the challenge to educators is, ‘How can we keep these stories alive when we cross the threshold of being living history to history, period?’ ”
There’s no one answer to that question, Singleton said, but educators try to bring the stories of survivors, victims, resistors, and liberators to the forefront.
“We start with individuals’ stories,” he said. “Showing one person’s experience and using that as an entry point to understand the magnitude of the Holocaust.”