Yom Hashoah

Thinking seriously about how we are failing at Holocaust Education

Photo by Sukanya Basu on Unsplash

On the car ride home from synagogue on Friday evening I asked my neighbour, an elderly Hungarian woman who escaped communism as a university student to get to Canada via Cuba, if she would be attending a Yom Hashoah event being put on by the Atlantic Jewish Council at the Immigration Museum on Sunday. 

She said no, and proceeded to explain why. She talked about how growing up in Hungary, even after the war, their apartment had looked out on bombed buildings - a constant reminder. She spoke of how her grandparents were lucky - yes lucky - to have been killed by Einsatzgruppen (a mobile killing unit), rather than being deported to a concentration camp. 

She then asked if I was going. 

I explained that I was, because I think it’s important to go to these events, even if for no other reason than because if people don’t go, they’ll stop having them. And we need to keep talking about the Holocaust.

At the event, a man got up to tell the story of how when he was four years old, his family escaped across the border from Alsace to safety in Switzerland. I was struck by how different the presentation was from those I had heard from Holocaust survivors growing up - most of whom were teenagers or young adults during the war and had clear memories of their experiences with ghettos, deportation, and concentration camps. Most of these individuals have since passed away.

There has been talk for many years of how we are moving ever closer to a time when there will be no more living Holocaust survivors. This is the reason why so many efforts have been made by universities, museums, and filmmakers to document their stories before they are lost. Sunday evening made clear why.

We need to hear these stories in all of their painful detail. We need to hear about yellow stars being sewn to jackets, and homes and businesses being appropriated. Because that is the story of the Holocaust - it began before the cattle cars and the camps - it began with the small acts that made the larger ones socially acceptable.

I was painfully aware of the fact that the only people in the room on Sunday who were not Jewish were public officials specifically invited by the Atlantic Jewish Council. Were any of us really the ones who needed to hear this story? 

Walking to work this morning, there were a new crop of “Israel is Committing Genocide” and “Fuck You Zionists” stickers plastered on parking meters and telephone poles. I cannot help but wonder if part of what leads us down the present path is our fading public memory of the Holocaust. 

It is not a secret that North America has done an abysmal job at Holocaust education. Surveys found that 32.9% of high school students across Canada and the US believe that the Holocaust may not have happened or that the number of Jews killed is greatly exaggerated. A Claims Conference survey of Americans across all 50 states, aged 18-39 found that 63% did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust and 48% could not name a concentration camp or ghetto. Further, 20% in New York responded with the belief that Jews were responsible for the Holocaust. This last statistic is interesting to think about given recent events.

I have, for some time, espoused agreement with Dara Horn and others who have voiced concern about the overemphasis on the Holocaust education as the answer to Antisemitic incidents in our schools and workplaces. My feelings on this have not changed.

An overemphasis on the Holocaust as the focal point of Antisemitism runs the risk of creating a false narrative that makes it seem like a problem that arose in the vacuum of 1939-1945. This is made clear every time the question “why did Hitler hate the Jews?” is asked; every time the experiences of Mizrahi Jews living in North Africa and the Arab world are erased; and when rather than shut out celebrities who make Antisemitic statements, we take them to a Holocaust museum. We aren’t discussing the Holocaust to the degree of completeness it requires; this is my contention.

Holocaust education can, and should be, the vehicle to have a larger conversation about Antisemitism and Hate. To understand the Holocaust, it is necessary to understand the long history of persecuting Jews that preceded it - the ways that Jews have always been considered an “other”, and how this was leveraged to systematically bar them from entering their places of education, run their businesses, join clubs and societies, and eventually remove them from their homes and murder them en masse. It is necessary to understand the horrors of the Holocaust to fully comprehend just how much Antisemitism is not a lesser form of racism. And it is necessary to understand that Jews liberated from concentration camps did not walk into a world ready to welcome them back to the homes and lives they occupied before the war. Holocaust education is a vehicle for discussing the 1948 partition that created the State of Israel and that the very next day, the surrounding Arab nations declared war on the only Jewish State. It is a tool for understanding why Jews cannot be White Supremacists, and why Israel is not a settler-colonialist enterprise.

This year, on Yom Hashoah, we said not only the prayer composed after the Holocaust to mourn the lives lost, but also the one composed after October 7. This year, perhaps like no other, there is a painful awareness of just how dangerous forgetting the events of the Holocaust is.