JKHA eighth graders have been taking part in a weekly Witness Seminar to educate students about the history of the Holocaust and the resilience of the Jewish people, culminating with a program on Yom HaShoah. The areas of focus of the program are the time before the war in Europe, the seeds of survival and resilience.
Students in the eighth grade Witness Seminar spent time this fall digging into their personal histories as they identified all the towns and shtetls in Europe where their relatives lived before the Holocaust. Students enjoyed making connections about shared geographical “hometowns,” and they’re looking forward to jumping into their Jewish Community Showcase project, through which they will engage in a student-driven, inquiry-based project that will allow them to research, examine and present about the vibrant Jewish communities that were thriving in Europe before the Holocaust.
This past week, the eighth graders in the Witness Seminar had the meaningful opportunity to engage with a powerful museum exhibit brought to the school entitled “The Architecture of Murder: the Auschwitz Birkenau Blueprints” provided to the community by the American Society for Yad Vashem. This impactful exhibit, created and developed by Yad Vashem, gave the students an opportunity to learn about the chilling blueprints for the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex that were found in a vacated Berlin apartment in 2008. With an introduction and guides exhibit walk-through provided by Marlene W. Yahalom, PhD, director of Education of the American Society for Yad Vashem, students were introduced to the planning, systems and administration required to create such a devastating murder machine as the Nazis did. The images ranged from diary entries and goodbye letters from victims who were murdered at Auschwitz to chillingly clinical blueprints, maps and photographs of the precise architectural plans created for the 450-acre camp (28 times the size of JKHA/RKYHS campus). Eighth grade students will continue to engage with this exhibit, and other exhibits provided by The American Society for Yad Vashem, as they launch into their study of what life was like during the war for those who survived and those who perished.
