NEWTON, Mass. — My children attend a wonderful preschool, where Jewish values and holidays are lived and learned in creative ways. Yet my daughter Aliza’s class commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day.
This is a bad idea.
I give lectures frequently across the country on Jewish identity, and people often come up to me afterward to tell me their stories. Sometimes adult women will tell me of nightmares they had as children based on Holocaust stories and how this has negatively affected their relationship with Judaism. Others share their amazement that Judaism is a positive religion, since their experience has been filled with heaviness and guilt.
So much of public Jewish life is filled with Holocaust commemoration. This is understandable, but not necessarily wise. We are the last generation to live among survivors who have important stories to tell. And the world needs to learn the lessons of standing up to tyranny and genocide. But we have to be careful about how we present these lessons.
The day after my children’s preschool Holocaust commemoration, Aliza celebrated her fifth birthday. She knows about Pharaoh and Haman. She even knows a little about Saddam Hussein. What one comes away with after talking to Aliza is that she’s a proud Jew. Aliza has no stigmas about being Jewish, even around Christmastime.
For the first time in 2,000 years, we have the opportunity to raise a generation of Jewish children who will not fear the shadow of history or their Christian neighbors.
Aliza and her sister, Hallel, will learn about the Holocaust when they are 8 or 9, when they understand time as linear. Younger children usually cannot distinguish between what was last year, last month or a decade or century ago. But they do know there was a world of ancient Israel and the Torah, and there is a “now.” The Pharaohs and Hamans didn’t look like us, used bows and arrows, rode on horses and lived in a time that was clearly different from our own.
In looking at one of the children’s Holocaust books, I noticed that it lacked this kind of differentiation. The victims were like us, dressed like us, looked like us. The bad guys drove cars, wore modern uniforms, carried guns, used radios and worked in modern-looking buildings.
I do not want my children looking over their shoulders in case someone is an anti-Semite. And I certainly don’t want them to know about concentration camps, as the children’s book describes.
There is a general consensus among Holocaust educators that “teaching about the Holocaust before the age of 8 is counterproductive,” says Shari Werb, an educator at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. “Children will only come away with nightmares. Even 8 is very young, unless the family has firsthand experience and there is a reason to talk about it,” she says.
Here are some tips on children and Holocaust commemoration:
*Joy first: Give your children eight to nine years of positive Jewish experiences and education, at home and at school. Fill their world, bookshelves and eager minds with biblical stories, rabbinic legends and glorious history.
*Prejudice: Use a life experience to raise the issue of prejudice in general. Did someone use a bad name at school? Teach them about Martin Luther King Jr. and the goals of the civil rights movement.
*Family history: If there are any survivors in your family, they should tell their stories, but leave out the gory details. If you have lost family in the Holocaust, light a yahrzeit candle at home and explain, again without the details, why you are lighting it.
*Plant: When children are 8 to 10, plant six yellow tulip bulbs in your garden with them in November in commemoration of Kristallnacht, the night the Nazis broke the windows of Jewish businesses and homes in Germany. They will bloom in time for Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. The yellow of the flowers reminds us of the yellow star Jews were forced to wear; six bulbs is for 6 million; and the tulip is the national flower of the Dutch, who saved so many Jews.
By thinking twice about when to tell our children about this terrible episode in human and Jewish history, perhaps we will rethink our community’s obsessions with the past and invest in a more positive future.