The Educational Approach of the

International School for Holocaust

Studies
Teaching the Holocaust as a human story

WWW.YADVASHEM.ORG
 What is our
approach about the
Holocaust?
 Yad Vashem’s Shoah
Definition

The Holocaust was the murder of approximately six million Jews by the
Nazis and their collaborators. Between the German invasion of the Soviet
Union in the summer of 1941 and the end of the war in Europe in May
1945, Nazi Germany and its accomplices strove to murder every Jew
under their domination. Because Nazi discrimination against the Jews
began with Hitler’s accession to power in January 1933, many historians
consider this the start of the Holocaust era. The Jews were not the only
victims of Hitler’s regime, but they were the only group that the Nazis
sought to destroy entirely.
Commemoration, History,
Education ?
What are your
goals?
 Yad Vashem

“And to them will I give in my house

and within my walls a memorial
and a name (a ‘yad vashem’)... that
shall not be cut off.”
(Isaiah, chapter 56, verse 5)
• The Jewish victim Abraham Löwin

• The bystander/ the perpetrator

• The Age-Appropriate approach

• The Inter-Disciplinary approach

• “Back to the core”, back to the

history Stary Sambor, Poland 1930’s
 The Victim : The Jewish Life Before

“And yet in the eyes of many, Auschwitz is a point of

origin for survivors. The name itself has an aura, albeit
a negative one, that came with the patina of time, and
people who want to say something important about
me announce that I have been in Auschwitz. But
whatever you may think, I don’t hail from Auschwitz, I
come from Vienna. Vienna is a part of me – that’s
where I acquired consciousness and acquired
language – but Auschwitz was as foreign to me as the
moon. Vienna is part of my mind-set, while Auschwitz
was a lunatic terra incognita, the memory of which is
like a bullet lodged in the soul where no surgery can
reach it. Auschwitz was merely a gruesome accident.”

Ruth Klüger, Still alive, Feminist Press: New York, pp.

111-112
 The Victim : Daily life during the Shoah

How can we study daily life during the

Shoah?

• What was life like in an inhumane

world?

• What happened to dignity, hope,

tradition, faith and identity?
 The Victim : Daily life during the Shoah

Moral dilemmas
• Survival means facing and living with moral dilemmas

• The reality of the Shoah meant a world with choiceless choices

as death was all around

• Our goal is to show the depth of the struggles of moral

questions
 The Victim : Daily life during the Shoah

Moral dilemmas

The family square, Yad Vashem

‫יד ושם‬
Yad Vashem

The Victim : Issues of returning to life

• “Liberation“

• Loneliness

• Searching

• Weddings

• Births

• Relocation

• Revenge

• Commemoration
 Perpetrators

How was it humanly possible?

• Killing out of Ideology?

• Following orders?
• Group pressure?

Himmler and Hoess, Auschwitz, 1941

 PERPETRATORS
VICTIMS

RIGHTEOUS
BYSTANDERS
AMONG THE
NATIONS
Age-appropriate pedagogies
Individual

Family

Community

History
 What are our challenges?

• History/ facts • Comparisons

• Definitions • Holocaust ‘fatigue’
• Knowledge Vs. and indifference
emotions • “Why is it always
• Issues of “lessons” about the Jews”
• Recommended • Holocaust denial,
techniques Antisemitism, Middle
East conflicts