los angeles | Sixty years after the end of the Holocaust, three leading American and Israeli organizations are pooling their resources to teach a new generation of students what can happen when unbridled hatred remains unopposed.
The Anti-Defamation League from New York, the Shoah Visual History Foundation in Los Angeles and Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Authority, joined last week to announce the launch of their joint Echoes and Reflections project.
Echoes and Reflections is to date the most comprehensive curriculum on the Holocaust, say its originators, and the goal is to introduce it in many American high schools as early as this fall.
The new program’s intent is to show that “the Holocaust is not only part of the world’s history, but part of its culture” in shaping personal identities, said Avner Shalev, the chairman of Yad Vashem.
In a similar sense, “the curriculum will help students understand the immense power of one person, one decision, one act of courage,” said Abraham Foxman, ADL’s national director, who survived the Holocaust as a hidden child.
Echoes and Reflections comprises 10 comprehensive lessons, each illustrated with maps, photographs, timelines, glossaries and primary source material, complemented by DVD and VHS technology.
The Shoah Foundation, founded by filmmaker Steven Spielberg, is providing 51 video testimonies by survivors and liberators, culled from its collection of 52,000 interviews.
“The testimonies often broach questions of fairness, justice, labeling and scapegoating — issues that confront adolescents in their daily lives,” said Douglas Greenberg, the foundation’s president and CEO.
Yad Vashem, with the largest Holocaust-related archives and document collection in the world, is contributing its historical expertise to the project.
ADL is serving as the program’s outreach arm, negotiating with school officials and state authorities throughout the nation.
One of ADL’s duties will be to encourage state legislatures to include Holocaust education in high schools, even in states that already have such mandatory classes on their books. There are now six such states, but their records are uneven. New Jersey has a well-running program, while California has passed the right law but has never provided the necessary funds to put it into motion.