Shoah education inspires non-Jewish teachers

When Kelly Webeck visited Nazi Germany’s former Chelmno extermination camp in Poland as part of the July 2015 European Holocaust tour of the Alfred Lerner Fellowship for Holocaust educators, she entered the small museum that stood in the center of the camp’s ruins and came across a sewing machine in one of the display cases. 

Dutch Holocaust historian Robert Jan van Pelt, who guided the school teachers participating in the tour, described the sewing machine as an object that concentration camp prisoners chose to bring with them because they still had hope.

“You bring a sewing machine because you actually believe you’re going to sew again someday,” said Webeck, a community art educator in Houston, who recounted how after seeing the machine, “I had to leave [the exhibit]. It was too much for me.”

That moment is symbolic of the impression the Lerner fellowship, which is organized by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous (JFR), leaves on teachers like Webeck.

“We’re not talking statistics here, 6 million, X number of Jews, X number of POWs,” said Amy McDonald, a fellowship participant who teaches history and an elective course on the Holocaust at Shades Valley High School in Birmingham, Ala. “What it boils down to is the tragedy of each individual life and each family.”

For the annual fellowship, JFR—which in 2014 awarded $1.7 million in support funds to non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust (individuals who are known as righteous gentiles)—selects 30 middle and high school English or social studies teachers from the U.S. and other countries who already teach about the Holocaust. As part of the program, the teachers first participate in an intensive summer institute at Columbia University.

At the institute, which was held in June this year, the teachers attend lectures by noted Holocaust scholars and then break into small groups to share their thoughts and develop new approaches to teaching the Holocaust. JFR fellows can also participate in a subsequent advanced seminar and join a two-week tour of European Holocaust sites.