On March 9 at 10:36 p.m., Justine Yan went online and posted on a Facebook wall.
“Memory fails, and perhaps the [Holocaust] experience has been buried so deep that it is hard to reclaim all the details exactly as they occurred,” she wrote about a Holocaust memoir she had just read.
Hardly the mundane Facebook updates the site’s users are accustomed to.
Yan’s thoughts were part of a long conversation she was having via Facebook with four of her peers, all of whom are enrolled in a six-month history fellowship for high school juniors and seniors through the Holocaust Center of Northern California.
The five teens see each other just once a month, but thanks to the Internet, “We work [our Holocaust research] into our daily lives,” said Yan, a junior at Irvington High School in Fremont. “With just a few clicks, we can read what everyone else is thinking and talking about.”
The Manovill Holocaust History Fellowship is academic and rigorous. It is open to a select group — just five students were accepted out of the 20 who applied.
Their monthly gatherings are filled with thoughtful questions and impassioned conversations. The fellows also come in on their own time, working independently in the Holocaust Center’s archives.
But it is technology that makes the fellowship possible. Because students gather only once a month, the Internet allows them to spend much more time with each other via Web sites like Facebook, which serves as a discussion board between monthly meetings, and Slideshare, which allows them to share PowerPoint presentations with one another.
“They’re taking advantage not only of the Holocaust Center, but also of each other,” said Morgan Blum, education director at the Holocaust Center.
Fellows are expected to spend six hours per month at the center on their own time, and two hours working on a community service project. They also spend a lot of time at home reading books, listening to oral histories or watching movies.
“I’ve had students’ parents tell me that they watch the movies together and discuss the Facebook discussion questions over the dinner table,” Blum said. “The whole family is learning from this.”
The fellowship began in January and ends in June. Students began by looking at the seldom-told story of what happened to the Jews who left Europe before the Holocaust and moved to Shanghai, Cuba and South Africa.
The teens then delved into ghettoization and deportation, individual stories of victims and survivors, and other genocides. Next month, they begin researching and writing their final project on a topic or person of their choice.
They rely on old newspaper articles, history books, memoirs, oral histories, documentaries, feature films and first-person accounts from Holocaust survivors.
They are required to research a genocide other than the Holocaust, and make a presentation to their peers at school. Those presentations are scheduled for later this month.
“I hope that my peers … will see that these instances of genocide do not take place only in the dusty pages of history books — that they will happen repeatedly in the future unless steps are taken,” said Andrew David King, a fellow and student at Moreau Catholic High School in Hayward.
Berkeley High School senior Liat Litwin will present to her alma mater, Tehiyah Day School, about the Armenian genocide.
“Before this fellowship, I was really close-minded — I truthfully thought of the Holocaust as the only genocide,” Litwin said. “I realized how dreadfully wrong I had been when I learned about other genocides.”
The Manovill Holocaust History Fellowship is new this year, but it existed in a different form for more than a decade. Students previously participated in a 10-week seminar for which they’d come to the Holocaust Center twice a week.
But because more and more students were commuting up to an hour or more each way, Blum changed the format of the fellowship to allow greater flexibility, as well as a more in-depth look at Holocaust history.
“I wanted to raise the bar of Holocaust and genocide education,” Blum said. “This is not an introductory Holocaust course. We’re not reading ‘The Diary of Anne Frank.’ ”
The program is also unique in that it is open to Jewish and non-Jewish teenagers. Of the five fellows, two are not Jewish.
The teens say they enjoy the group’s diversity. When Litwin and Yan were studying the Jewish flight to Shanghai, “we marveled at how I could read the Chinese on the documents, while she could read much of the Hebrew,” Yan said. “ ‘We make a great team,’ we’d say to each other and smile.’ ”