The American Association for Jewish Education announced today it has received a $30,000 grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture to create an experimental curriculum on the Holocaust for high school classes of Jewish day, communal and congregational schools.
The 10 unit program, new being prepared under the supervision of the AA JE’s National Curriculum Research Institute, “will employ a dramatically different approach to teaching the subject than is found in any other major course of Holocaust study prevalent in Jewish secondary education,” said Arthur Brody of Watchung, N.J., president of the AA JE.
He said the approach “is based upon the scholarly compilation of primary source material encompassing concentration camp memoirs to Third Reich documents to Allied reports on the Nazi extermination program–which is designed to let the student learn for himself the nature and extent of the Holocaust and there upon form his own judgement on its significance to Jewish life, thought and history.”
Brody said it “differs markedly from conventional Jewish school curricula which, by their common use of narrative exposition, must of necessity reflect and advocate a predetermined point of view. Our program is formulated on the belief that such a point of view, however valid, cannot have as meaningful an impact on a young person as that which he comes to through his own discovery of unbiased factual data.”
PROGRAM TO BE TESTED
The AAJE program material, which will be tested and evaluated during the 1979-80 school year prior to publication in The Brandeis School in Lawrence, N.Y., Flatbush Yeshiva in Brooklyn and temple Sinai in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., will consist of historical, political, literary and theological sources, Brady said. “Every fact of Jewish life, including even so seemingly esoteric a subject as theology, was brought into play during the Holocaust period,” he said. “To cite a single example of this last element, the source material will include records of halachic arguments among Jews in concentration camps concerning the validity of abortions–essentially forbidden by Jewish law unless the mother’s physical health is threatened–in order to prevent-the Nazis’ common practice of putting to death all women the learned were pregnant.”
Brody said that eight Jewish scholars are developing the units on the following subjects: Dr. Isaac Lewin, “The World That Was”; Prof. Ismar Schorsch, “The Antecedents of Nazi Germany”; Dr. Lucan Dobroszycki, “Nazi Germany” and “Destruction”; Dr. Isalah Trunk, “Resistance” and “Kiddush Hachayim” (sancti-fication of life); Prof. Henry Feingold, “The Response of the Free World”; Efraim Zuroff, “The Uniqueness of the Shoah”; Prof. Eliezer Berkowits. “What it Means to be a Jew After Auschwitz”; and Dr. Franklin Littel, “The Righteous Among the Nations.” He added that each unit will be supplemented by a teacher’s guide, dealing with presentation methodology that is being prepared by Jay Schechter, a pedagogic specialist in the area of Holocaust instruction.
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