By Ashley M. Casey
Associate Editor
A Liverpool High School teacher is spending 10 days in Jerusalem with 34 other educators learning how to better teach their students about the Holocaust.
Rhiannon Berry, who teaches 10th grade English, was chosen for the Echoes and Reflections Advanced Learning Seminar, which takes place July 8 through 18 at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
“I was thrilled,” Berry said of her selection for the program.
According to Sheryl Ochayon, Yad Vashem’s program director for Echoes and Reflections, the program consists of “10 full days of lectures, workshops and trips around Israel.”
“This will not only broaden their knowledge but will contribute to their understanding of the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish life after such a trauma. Participants will hear stories they haven’t heard before, and will work in groups to collaborate and discover new ways to make the Holocaust relevant to teenagers today,” Ochayon said. “A very impactful part of this seminar will also be meetings we have scheduled with two survivors — one from Poland and one from Hungary — with two very different stories. Both these women have powerful stories and I’m sure the participants will remember them and be inspired by them.”
Echoes and Reflections also offers a five-day trip to Poland for educators that tours the concentration and extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka as well as the ghettos and deportation points that victims of the Holocaust passed through.
“Although this is a very different trip than the Poland trip, it gives the participants twice the amount of time to bond, form a cohort that will help each other down the road, and also to have fun and experience Israeli culture and atmosphere,” Ochayon said of the Jerusalem seminar.
Berry said she has been a scholar of the Holocaust since her college days, but she has been interested in learning about the atrocities humans can commit against one another since she was a child.
“I was really bothered if someone was unfairly attacked … just because they were different or weak I was always a deep little feeler even as a little kid,” Berry said. “I couldn’t comprehend that a human being would be capable of doing that to another human being. The more I learned, the less I understood it.”
Berry said she remembered studying the 1970s genocide in Cambodia and the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in high school and making the connection that history will repeat itself if hatred is left unchecked.
“You read Anne Frank but you’re 15, 14 and you can’t really grasp it — how could you? [Then you think,] ‘Wait a minute I’ve seen this before,” she said.
Lessons from the Holocaust continue to resonate today. Antisemitism still exists, as evidenced by shootings at synagogues in Poway, California, earlier this year and in Pittsburgh in October 2018.
“It wasn’t as long ago as people think it was,” Berry said of the Holocaust.
Atrocities like the Holocaust don’t explode out of nowhere, Berry explained.
“You have this magnified bombshell of hatred, but then you look at these early moments,” she said.
Subtle comments and jokes build into years of oppression in a “pyramid of hate,” Berry said.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Islamophobia has grown in the United States, and Berry said her own students of Middle Eastern or Muslim origin have shared stories of aggression they have had to deal with.
“Our students are leaving realizing hate is not [in] a vacuum. It’s not a ‘one and done’ incident,” she said.
Ochayon, the program director for Echoes and Reflections, said it is important to teach young people the chain reaction of human decisions that lead to genocide.
“One of the things that Echoes and Reflections certainly tries to teach is what happens when people make choices that result in dehumanization and marginalization of other people how easily that hate can turn into violence and genocide,” she said. “[We must teach young people] to make decisions that rest on their values as human beings and to value human beings.”
Berry said she is hoping the Jerusalem seminar will help her teach her students to think critically about their role in halting hatred.
While Berry is doing what she can to pass these lessons onto her students, parents must reinforce lessons of compassion and justice at home she said.
“It’s universal — it’s not Ms. Berry’s 10th-grade English class, block 3,” she said. “Discuss what hatred looked like in different generations to help them to see hatred for what it is and help them to be willing to discuss, to challenge their kids to really own who they are and stand up for people.”
Ochayon and Berry recognize that the Holocaust is a very heavy topic. Ochayon said the motto for teaching young people about atrocities such as the Holocaust is “safely in, safely out.”
“When you’re teaching a subject as difficult as the Holocaust, you want to make sure you’re not traumatizing kids,” she said. “Parents and teachers have the best handle on how much their children and students can take.”
Instead of posing questions like “What would you have done if you lived in Nazi Germany?” — “Don’t put yourself in their shoes because you won’t be able to and thank God you won’t be able to,” Ochayon said — parents and teachers should discuss with kids stories of survivors, allies who hid and protected Jews and people who fought in the resistance.
“Some of the best stories are about how people kept their human dignity, how they resisted, how they kept believing in God, how they wrote diaries without even having access to pencils, writing music and poetry in their heads,” Ochayon said. “Stories of people who are able to rise above it and resist even for a little while [resonate] with teenagers. A lot of times it empowers the kids who are studying this because they need examples of resilience.”
Berry said students could become numb to the horrific images of skeletal concentration camp survivors and mass graves, so the key is to focus on how they can apply their lessons to today’s society.
“What is my role in this issue as a human being, where do I stand and what do I do because of that? That’s where education has power. That’s where it has meaning,” she said.
Lessons about one’s place in society can resonate with kids for whom “school’s not their thing,” Berry said.
“They start to see how much power they have in their own story. They’re actively participating as a citizen and that’s the dream. That’s the goal,” she said.
Ochayon said Echoes and Reflections features free, online resources for teachers ranging from primary sources (such as literature, art, photos and films) to dozens of fully developed lesson plans as well as webinars and training sessions.
“That will get your feet wet,” she said.
Educators who are interested in learning more about Echoes and Reflections programming can visit echoesandreflections.org.
