These initiatives for Shoah programs include:
*Convening a three-day conference next year at which views on “Faith after the Holocaust” will be presented;
*Publishing an anthology of sources representing all theological points of view on the subject;
*Creating revised school syllabuses and other educational materials for use in public schools, Hebrew schools and yeshiva day schools.
“Holocaust curricula previously developed in the United States and Israel tended to focus on the past, rather than the future,” said Jerry Hochbaum, Memorial Foundation executive vice president.
“They most often addressed issues that were two decades old and failed to take into account such radical changes that have taken place in the past 50 years,” he said. Among those changes are “the passing of the generation of survivors, the gradual Americanization of the Shoah as American Jews increasingly view the Holocaust through the prism of American society and not through a Jewish lens, the increased polarization of Jewish life, rampant assimilation, and the increasing cultural gap between America and Israel.”
This year’s grants were made to 69 projects and to 383 educators and communal workers.