April 17


A painful lesson to teach


For millions, the Holocaust swallowed up hope, faith and trust in
humankind as surely as a black hole swallows light.

And yet, that period also turns on the lights for the children in Kathie
Williams' eighth grade class at Bowman Middle School in Plano. That's why
Ms. Williams is passionate about teaching Holocaust literature.

****

HOW TO TEACH KIDS ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST

Once you've decided to introduce your child to the Holocaust, where do you
start? Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (Bantam, $4.99) is a classic
for middle schoolers and there are many other choices for that and other
age groups. Here is a small sampling, compiled from several experts,
including spokesmen for the Holocaust Museum Houston and the Dallas
Holocaust Museum Center.

EARLY ELEMENTARY
At this age, books that teach tolerance in general can lay the groundwork
for later questions about the Holocaust.

Brundibar by Tony Kushner, illustrated by Maurice Sendak (Hyperion,
$19.95)

Kids will find this a hopeful story about children who get milk to save
their ailing mother. Parents will get the underlying sadness.

LATE ELEMENTARY
Children may be ready for more details, but at this age it's still
advisable not to give them graphic detail of life in the camps.

Fireflies in the Dark by Susan Goldman Rubin (Holiday House, $8.95)

A Jewish teacher taught art to the children of the Terezin Concentration
Camp. She and most of the children died, but they hid 5,000 drawings in
suitcases found after the war.

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry (Yearling, $5.99)

The Newbery Medal-winner tells the story of the friendship between two
young girls and how the friendship between Danish Christians and Jews
saved so many of Denmark's Jewish population.

MIDDLE SCHOOL
At this age, kids empathize best with stories about kids close to their
age.

Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli (Alfred A. Knopf, $15.95)

A boy with no name and no identity is shaped by the events and the people
he meets in Nazi-controlled Warsaw.

Hana's Suitcase by Karen Levine (Albert Whitman, $15.95)

A curator at the Tokyo Holocaust Museum learns what happened to the girl
whose name is on a suitcase sent from Auschwitz.

HIGH SCHOOL
At this age, kids are ready to think about moral and ethical choices.

Escape from Sobibor (Westlake Entertainment, NR, $14.95, 119 min.)

The story of a concentration camp uprising won two Golden Globes. Also
consider the feature films Schindler's List, Life is Beautiful and The
Pianist.

****


"These kids have grown up with violent video games and violent movies,"
says Ms. Williams, who notes that most of the students in her racially
mixed class know little about the Holocaust before she starts teaching it.

"The whole violence thing doesn't move them. But then when they read about
how these people suffered and how there are no graves for their relatives
to visit, I have kids crying. I have kids who get angry. We talk it out.
It opens up conversations between different groups, and it teaches them
about tolerance and forgiveness. They become better human beings from
having studied this."

It's a subject on many people's minds as Holocaust Remembrance Day
approaches on Sunday. Some parents are torn about the best time and best
way to introduce children to this painful subject.

A flood of books and movies about the Holocaust have joined Anne Frank:
The Diary of a Young Girl (Bantam, $4.99) since it was published in 1947.
There's more fiction inspired by the Holocaust as well. Elliott Dlin,
executive director of the Dallas Holocaust Memorial Center, says the
volume of work has increased in the last 15 years as aging Holocaust
survivors preserve their stories for future generations. But a recent
spate of picture books about the Holocaust has led some to question the
appropriateness of this subject for young readers. Luba: The Angel of
Bergen Belsen (Tricycle Press, $16.95) is the true story of a woman who
sheltered orphans in a concentration camp, and Erika's Story (Creative
Editions, $15.95) is the true story of a woman who was saved by being
tossed, as an infant, from a train carrying Jews to the death camps.

While the publishers recommend these books for ages 9-12, many experts
express concerns that because these are picture books, parents will buy
them for younger children.

Laurence Roth, coordinator of the Jewish Studies Program at Susquehanna
University in Selinsgrove, Pa., thinks that would be a mistake.

"My son, who is no different from any other 5-year-old, is going to be
susceptible to nightmares," says Dr. Roth. "Is that really the first thing
that very young students and our children ought to learn about 2,000 years
of Jewish history?"

However, he plans to introduce his son to Eve Bunting's picture book,
Terrible Things (The Jewish Publication Society, $6.95), when he turns 6.

In Terrible Things, dark shadows come for the birds, but the other animals
don't help because they're not birds. The Terrible Things pick off the
animals, population by population, because the different groups don't
stand up for each other.

"This creates an understanding of how terrible things happen to all
people," Dr. Roth says. "When you educate children, it's best to educate
them as to a wider sense of how human beings relate to each other."

That's also the philosophy at the Holocaust Museum Houston, where parents
with young children are encouraged to read them books that tackle
prejudice in a nonliteral way, such as Dr. Seuss' The Sneetches and Other
Stories (Random House, $10.47). In that story, kids can see the silliness
of creatures who think the ones with stars on their bellies are better
than those who don't have them "on thars." A child who understands that
will understand the lessons of the Holocaust better, museum spokesman
Michael Rosen says.

"We recommend beginning to teach children the lessons of the Holocaust no
earlier than fifth grade, although many school districts begin as early as
fourth grade," says Mr. Rosen. But once they are old enough, he believes
the stories should be told as soon as possible, because survivors and
witnesses, including soldiers and rescuers, are aging and dying.

Dr. Jud Newborn, co-author of Shattering the German Night: The Story of
the White Rose (Little, Brown, $35.10), saw his first Holocaust
documentary at age 8. He doesn't recommend introducing it that early to
others. At the same time, he says, it made him who he is today.

"I was shocked and devastated," recalls Dr. Newborn. "I remember pounding
a pillow and feeling a tremendous helplessness in the face of evil and my
incapacity to understand it. But that was a turning point in my life. I
decided I needed to understand it. It led me ultimately to focus on why
the Holocaust happened and how we can make sure it never happens again."

Mr. Dlin says that 25 years of working in Holocaust museums, including
Israel's famed Yad Vashem, has taught him that parents and teachers are
the best judge of a child's readiness.

"My bottom line is that if you're concerned that it might not be
appropriate, chances are it's not. Wait. Nothing bad happens if someone
has his confrontation with the Holocaust later in life."

It's a subject that moves all ages at different levels of depth, he adds.

"The subject matter is inherently meaningful. It shows the extremities of
good and evil. It shows human depravity and greatness. It shows people in
the most intense crucible of pressure and illustrates, in a stark human
fashion, the range of human responses from the very best to the very
worst. It is really a window to look at ourselves."

The Plano eighth-grade teacher, Ms. Williams, was not hurt by waiting. Ms.
Williams, 51, began her journey into Holocaust literature 18 years ago
after her students started asking more questions about Anne Frank than she
could answer.

"The more I researched, the more I got into it," says Ms. Williams."I've
become a real student of that period of time. I'm still learning.

"Usually the first question people ask me is, 'Are you Jewish?,' " says
Ms. Williams, who is a Methodist. "And I always answer, 'I didn't know you
had to be Jewish to care.' "

**************************



Remember: Holocaust museums seek broad audience


This year, for the first time, Dallas' Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony
will take place in a non-Jewish space. The observance of Yom Hashoah
Sunday evening at Thanks-Giving Square downtown is designed to welcome a
wider audience.

"I would argue that the Holocaust doesn't belong to the Jewish people any
more than the Alamo belongs to Texas," said Elliott Dlin, executive
director of the Dallas Holocaust Memorial Center.

The small North Dallas museum, which is moving ahead with plans to build a
freestanding museum downtown, is part of an intensifying national effort
by Holocaust museums to reach and educate non-Jewish audiences in new
ways.

"This is not a Jewish experience. It's a human experience. ...We need to
ensure that this next generation of Americans knows what can happen."

There are more than 30 Holocaust museums nationally. A dozen have been
built since 1980.

They range from the cramped, 20-year-old Dallas museum, which is wedged
into the basement of the Jewish Community Center on Northaven Road, to the
impressive U.S. museum, which is celebrating 10 hugely successful years on
the National Mall. Michigan's Holocaust Center is opening a new museum
this week.

The museums' growth and success have raised questions. All Holocaust
museums teach about tolerance and responsibility, but museums differ in
how boldly they attempt to prescribe behavior. Museums juggle how much
emphasis to give victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, and what role to
give religion.

Meanwhile the museums attract a steady stream of visitors, including many
teachers and students who have drawn powerful and unexpected lessons from
the systematic murder of 6 million Jews 60 years ago.

"The audience from here forward is not about memory or biography," said
Ellen Smith, chief curator at the National Museum for Jewish History in
Philadelphia. "The audience from here on forward is people who never
participated in it (the Holocaust) at any level ... and will still take
something from it into the future."

Whom are museums reaching?

Trevor Monteiro, a 19-year-old from Garland, won a statewide Holocaust art
contest last year with a stark pencil drawing of a woman crouched alone in
the corner of a boxcar. Trevor, a Catholic, said he drew on his mother's
experience as a Kenyan of Indian descent, who experienced painful
discrimination in Africa as well as the United States.

"If you don't understand the world and what's going on, it could be you"
next, said Mr. Monteiro, a student from the University of Texas at
Arlington who will light the candle of commemoration at the Dallas
Holocaust ceremony Sunday night.

At Tyler Street Christian Academy in North Oak Cliff, Holocaust lessons
are taught for up to six weeks each year in grades 4 through 12. The
student body is 55 percent black, and 45 percent Hispanic or Anglo.

"Teaching the Holocaust to ethnically diverse kids is an experience," said
Kathy Chapman, who began developing Holocaust curricula after training at
the U.S. museum. "They understand stereotyping, scapegoating, and
profiling. They can understand the basis for those words, and they can
understand that when those things are taken to the extreme, what can
happen."

A decade ago, Kadian Pow was among the first high school students in
Washington to tour the new U.S. museum. She immediately began volunteering
there, and her 10-year relationship with the museum has included work as a
student intern and consultant. Now pursing a master's degree at the
University of Wisconsin, she said the museum has helped her identify her
place in the world.

"We need to think about other people as ourselves," said Ms. Pow, who was
born in Jamaica and raised Christian. "When we capitalize on difference,
that's when we're in danger, when we say, 'That person isn't like me.' You
can't get to a point when you have genocide until you can create that
atmosphere of hate and indifference."

As the Holocaust recedes into history, and its aging survivors die, some
educators said, it is the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and their
aftermath that have illuminated debate about civil rights, anti-Semitism,
hate crimes, religious discrimination, and the persistence of evil.

"Before 9-11, it was harder to teach this subject," said Ms. Chapman, who
leads Holocaust seminars for teachers. Students, she said, "didn't
understand how you could do something so horrible as the Holocaust just
because you hated a group of people. ... 9-11 helped them understand."

That makes students think about both the importance of tolerance and its
limits, Mr. Dlin said.

"Mass murder is intolerable. Ethnic jokes and slurs should be intolerable.
Genocide is intolerable. Bullying on the school playground is
intolerable."

Each museum presents the Holocaust in different ways, and to different
effect. Some shock. Some nudge. Some tear at the heart. Each chooses what
to emphasize among the stories of people whose lives were changed by the
Holocaust.

The museums have always served overwhelmingly non-Jewish audiences, and
interest and demand from those audiences is what's driving the increased
educational efforts.

"One of the signs of the extraordinary significance and meaning of the
museum's message is that people have seen a potential in our institution
that we ourselves didn't realize," said Sara Bloomfield, director of the
U.S. museum, where 15 percent of the visitors are Jewish. When the
District of Columbia police chief turned to the museum for help teaching
officers to handle authority in responsible, moral ways, the museum
created a program that has now trained nearly 20,000 police officers, FBI
agents and military academy cadets.

Does that mean the museums are turning away from the Jewish experience?
Never, officials say. The Holocaust will always be an event Jews grapple
with and grieve within their own faith tradition.

But by pushing for Holocaust museums and education in public spheres, the
Jewish community has chosen to have "a very brave and profound
conversation about the place of a minority in this country and the role of
prejudice," said Ms. Smith, of the Philadelphia museum. "They are shaping
the conversation ... but they are not controlling the conversation."

The Miami Beach Holocaust Memorial begins with a sculpture of a mother
protecting her children and ends with their fallen bodies. The U.S. museum
challenges visitors to think about the role of bystanders who did little
to stop the killing. Museums present the way Catholics, Protestants and
members of other faith groups either helped the Nazis or lost their lives
challenging them.

"I think any museum that tries to inculcate a single message is doomed to
fail because people will emerge with multiple messages. It's much more
productive to bring people into a story and deepen their search in it
rather than giving them pat answers," said Edward Linenthal, author of
Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum.

Mr. Linenthal also said he worries that having a national holocaust museum
allows government officials to believe that they are paying due note to
the Holocaust without applying its lessons to mass murder in places such
as Rwanda and Bosnia.

Officials say their goal is to keep visitors thinking and questioning
after they leave the museums.

"Evil is not an eradicable disease; it's part of the human condition," Ms.
Bloomfield said. "Once we accept that, what's our responsibility? ... In a
way, we're posing more questions than we answer."

Mr. Dlin, who worked at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, for 22
years, loves those questions.

He hopes visitors will leave the Holocaust Center saying, "That happened
60 years ago, 70 years ago, what's different today? How do we ensure that
such things don't happen again to Jews or to anybody else? How do we
ensure that the kinds of people who became murderers in the Third Reich
aren't our friends, our neighbors, or our families or ourselves?

"What checks and balances do we have in our world today to ensure that we
don't deteriorate along that slippery slope that leads to mass murder?
What are the early warning systems that are in place? Because clearly we
know that the Holocaust didn't begin with death camps and gas chambers."

When Greta Zetley, 76, of Dallas talks about her four years as a prisoner
of the Nazis, the horror is palpable.

She describes the eeriness of entering a concentration camp in Riga,
Latvia, at age 14 after being transported from her home in Burger,
Germany.

"We got into the camp, and the stoves were on, but there were no people.
But it looked like someone had lived there," she said. "There was blood in
the streets. They had killed all the Latvian Jews to make room for us.

"Right away you knew what was going to happen. They didn't need us.
Whatever happened, they would kill us."

They killed her father, and, later, her brother. She and her mother
survived years of forced labor "I don't know how, believe me" and moved
to Texas in 1949.

Yet her story was punctuated by small but important kindnesses shown
during the ordeal: the Catholic teacher in her hometown who gave her warm
socks, the Russian soldier, a Jew, who helped her onto the right train
after her liberation.

Mrs. Chapman hopes her students would do the same.

"If I don't teach them anything else, I want to teach them to get
involved," she said. "You're either letting someone do something to
someone else, or you're doing something about it and trying to stop it.
... You have to get involved."

(Diane Connolly, a former Religion editor of The Dallas Morning News, is
editor of ReligionLink (www.religionwriters.com), an Internet news service
about religion, culture, and public policy)

***************************


Dallas Holocaust museum has big plans for move


There are a two things standing between Elliott Dlin and his dream of
giving Dallas a Holocaust museum downtown:

Property to put it on, and about $10 million.

The executive director of the Dallas Holocaust Memorial Center is
currently negotiating for land near the Sixth Floor Museum while also
scouting for temporary quarters. The museum will vacate its
4,000-square-foot home, in the basement of the Jewish Community Center at
7900 Northaven Road in North Dallas, at the end of June.

Mr. Dlin said the 20-year-old museum has outgrown its location. About
38,000 people visit the center each year - 98 percent of them not Jewish -
but classes are turned away because the museum can't accommodate them.

Downtown, he said, it will be accessible to far more people.

"Nobody walks along Northaven Road and says, 'Gee, I've got an hour to
kill. I wonder if there's an interesting cultural institution nearby.'"

A capital campaign will seek money from individuals, foundations and
corporations. He hopes to open the new museum in three to five years.

Plans call for a 35,000-square-foot museum, 25,000 square feet of which
would be initially finished out. The Holocaust Museum Houston, which has
22,000 square feet, opened in 1996 at an initial cost of $3.5 million.

His target audience?

"Basically, everybody."

********************


Girl and 'her' Torah are both survivors from Romania


"This is a Torah that needs to be given a voice," said Rabbi David Lyon .
"And Millie's is the voice."

The Torah in question was confiscated by the German army in the 1940s. The
voice was that of Camille Rose "Millie" Tenenholtz, 13, who read from the
holy scroll when she celebrated her Bat Mitzvah last year.

That two came together through a combination of coincidence, patience,
persistence and, some would say, providence.

The Holocaust Torah at Temple Shalom of Dallas is one of 1,564 known to
have survived the Nazis. As Hitler's troops looted synagogues in Eastern
Europe, they seized the scrolls and other items, intending to display them
one day in a "museum of an extinct people."

After the war, the cache of Torahs was discovered in Prague. In 1964, the
so-called "Czech Memorial Scrolls" were sent to Westminster Synagogue in
London, where they were inspected, numbered and catalogued.

Many have since been sent worldwide to houses of worship and educational
institutions for display as Holocaust memorials.

Temple Shalom, which acquired its scroll in 1972, has one of few that
originated in Romania. (There are at least six other Holocaust scrolls in
the area.)

Millie is also from Romania, adopted in 1990 when she was 5 weeks old by
Barry and Tana Tenenholtz of Plano. Millie is now a seventh-grader at
Plano's Wilson Middle School.

"When I was really little, just 5 or 7, I heard my rabbi talk about a
Torah adopted from Romania," Millie said. "It was an orphan from Romania,
and so was I."

As her mother recalls it, "Every time we went to temple, she'd tell me she
wanted to read from that Torah at her Bat Mitzvah."

But there were complications. Like most Holocaust Torahs, the scroll is
fragile, and chiefly for display. It has been deemed "pasul," ritually
unfit to be read from, because of its poor condition.

The Tenenholtzes learned this a month before the Bat Mitzvah.

Millie's parents said the easygoing child became upset at the news. Still,
she found another way for the Torah to fill her thoughts and time. As she
studied for her Bat Mitzvah, she, her mother and her grandmother worked
together on a velvet and needlepoint "wimple," or ceremonial binder, for
the Romanian Torah.

If Millie couldn't read from "her" scroll, she could at least clothe it in
ivory, green, and gold.

But her father wasn't giving up. Through the Internet, Barry Tenenholtz
found a synagogue in San Diego, Congregation Beth Am, that had allowed
every Bar and Bat Mitzvah child to read from its pasul Torah since the
scroll was acquired in 1983. Rabbi Wayne Dosick explained that he regarded
the Holocaust scroll as "a living memorial and not a museum piece."

By letting the children use it, he said, the congregation was paying
tribute to the memory of "those children who didn't live to stand at the
Torah. And at the same time, we celebrate that a new generation of Jewish
children is standing at the Torah, triumphing over evil and serving God."

Mr. Tenenholtz appealed to Temple Shalom's spiritual and lay leadership,
citing this precedent from Southern California. Letting her read from the
Torah, he argued, "would be a tribute to survivors of the Holocaust, and
also serve to memorialize [all] children who perished and were never able
to have a Bar or Bat Mitzvah."

The temple leaders agreed.

And so, last Aug. 30, Millie Tenenholtz stood before her congregation to
read a passage about the creation of a justice system in biblical times.
She wore glasses to help with the tiny Hebrew script. Her reading was
perfect.

"I was so emotional, my legs were shaking," Rabbi Lyon recalled. He
reminded Millie that this Torah was "a symbol of perseverance and destiny,
like you yourself holding the past, representing the future."

(source for all: Dallas Morning News)