The New York State Board of Regents will next year honor both a teacher and a school volunteer for outstanding contributions to Holocaust education, Regent Emeritus Louis Yavner announced at a recent meeting of the Regents here.
Yavner, who established an annual teacher award and $500 stipend upon his retirement from the Board four years ago, presented this year’s award to Clayton Adams of Kenmore, New York. Adams, a social studies teacher in Kenmore West Senior High School, created an elective Holocaust Studies course 14 years ago and has been teaching the subject since then.
“I am particularly impressed that in a community north of Buffalo, far from the large concentration of Jews in the New York City area, Mr. Adams has been stimulated as a good Gentile to teach the message of the Holocaust to the Gentile community,” Yavner told the JTA.
“My objective in creating this award was to stimulate teachers into studying the Holocaust themselves, and then teaching it to others.”
In accepting his award, Adams told the Regents: “The Holocaust is not the private suffering of the Jews and other victims of the Nazis. It was and should be treated as a public tragedy. I want my students to understand that it was mankind’s disaster and that its message and its impact didn’t stop 40 years ago.” He pointed out that most of his students are not Jewish.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
