Educators who teach Holocaust history face the same challenge every year: how to get students interested in one of history’s greatest tragedies more than 65 years removed from World War II.
In the old days, the formula was straightforward.
“You show kids horrifying pictures, scare them, then you traumatize them” was how Nina Sasportas, a teacher at the Jewish High School in Berlin, put it. The result, she said, was that “many either block out the memory or get Holocaust exhaustion. This is true if the child is Jewish or not.”
In recent years, however, some educators have shifted their approach toward teaching individual stories.
PRAGUE – As thousands of protesters condemned Israel’s blockade of Gaza in cities across Europe, reactions within Jewish communities ranged from mild concern to alarm.
On Saturday, 6,000 protesters marched in Germany, 20,000 in France, and 2,000 in London against Israel’s actions in the May 31 confrontation with a Gaza-bound aid flotilla that left nine Turkish pro-Palestinian activists dead.
In Brussels, protesters in front of the Israeli Embassy shouted their support for Hezbollah, jihad, and Hamas, with some calling witnesses who tried to take pictures “dirty Jews,” according to Dan Levy, vice president of the Union of Jewish Students from Belgium.
PRAGUE – For Jews, Poland’s late president, Lech Kaczynski, was a man of many firsts.
He was the first Polish president to attend a service at a Polish synagogue, the first to celebrate Chanukah at the presidential palace, the first Polish leader to provide support for a Jewish history museum on Polish soil.
His death in Saturday’s plane crash along with his wife Maria and 96 members of Poland’s political elite represents a huge loss for the Polish-Jewish relationship, Poland’s chief rabbi, New York native Michael Schudrich, told JTA.
PRAGUE – When President Obama announced at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh late last month that Iran had built a secret nuclear plant in Qom, southwest of Tehran, he was followed by a visibly angry French President Nicolas Sarkozy and an unusually harsh British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Sarkozy was particularly pugnacious when he spoke, warning the Islamic Republic that it had until December to come clean on its nuclear weapons program or face punishment. The usually reserved Brown accused Iran of “serial deception.”
Again earlier this month, U.S. and European officials stood shoulder to shoulder in Geneva in talks with Iran about its nuclear program.
PRAGUE – Stuart Eizenstat, who led the U.S. government delegation to the June 26-29 Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague, sat down with JTA for an interview on the eve of the conference.
The conference, organized by the Czech government, brought together representatives of 49 countries for what participants said was likely to be the last major attempt to compensate Holocaust victims and their heirs for art and property confiscated or sold under duress during the Nazi era.
Eizenstat, a lawyer who served as undersecretary of state under President Clinton and recently was appointed chairman of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, is largely credited with getting Jewish property restitution started in the former Eastern bloc after the end of the Communist era. He also was the lead negotiator in the $1.25 billion settlement with Swiss banks in 1999.
PRAGUE – Ten European Union countries where claimants of looted art, communal property, or private property face serious obstacles:
• Poland: Has not enacted any form of private restitution or compensation for an estimated $30.5 billion worth of property confiscated by Nazis or Communists. The Jewish share of claims on those properties is estimated at 20 percent to 27 percent. Poland has a very slow and burdensome process for restitution of Jewish communal property. Since 1997, 5,500 claims were filed but only 1,625 were adjudicated.
PRAGUE – It has the tone of a newspaper from Berlin in 1936, except it’s from Vilnius in 2009.
The face of a rabbi is enlarged on the cover of a Lithuanian tabloid with the words “Give it now!” emblazoned across the top. The subject, Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international affairs for the American Jewish Committee, is cast as the villain, looking down on a miniature Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius, portrayed as defenseless at the hands of some Shylock.
The image, which appeared on the June 26 edition of the popular right-wing daily Vakaro Zinios (The Evening News), alludes to Baker’s demand that the Lithuanian government return Jewish property after eight years of promises to do so.
PRAGUE – Gains by anti-Semitic, xenophobic, and racist far-right parties in June 4-7 elections for the European Parliament were a reminder of how voters across Europe gravitate toward fringe parties and extremists during tough economic times.
As in the United States, Europe is experiencing levels of unemployment not seen since the Great Depression. The financial misery has given rise here to increased nationalism, skewing an election of representatives whose job is mostly to pass Europe-wide regulations on food and safety standards, the environment, and internal market competition.
Ishtiaq Ahmed, who works as a spokesman for the Bradford Council for Mosques in Bradford, England, lives with three generations of his family in a luxurious British home built by his father, a successful Pakistani-born businessman.
After the July 7, 2005, public transit bombings in London, which killed 52 people, Ahmed woke up, looked around his neighborhood, and was troubled by what he saw. Three of the four bombers were from nearby Leeds and, like him, they had Pakistani backgrounds.
“There is a growing section of Muslim young people 16 to 25 who are increasingly becoming alienated, disillusioned, and angry about a host of issues, such as unemployment, racism, and British foreign policy,” Ahmed said.
BRUSSELS – Viviane Teitelbaum was a new member of Brussels’ regional legislature when she sponsored a bill in 2005 to renew the region’s scientific and industrial research agreement with Israel.
Legislators had frozen the cooperation pact three years earlier to protest what they said was the Jewish state’s inhumane response to the second Palestinian intifada. But when Teitelbaum’s proposal came up for discussion at a committee meeting, she says she was shouted down by Socialist Party opponents.
“The only lawmakers who showed up to the meeting were Muslim,” recalled Teitelbaum, a Jewish member of the Liberal Party. “They screamed insults at me, saying, ‘Israel is a fascist country. You will never get this passed.’” Later, at the actual vote, Teitelbaum again was shouted down. Her proposal was defeated.
