The Baltimore Jewish Council is partnering with the Baltimore Hebrew Institute and Towson University’s Sandra R. Berman Center for Humanity, Tolerance & Holocaust Education to hold a three-day professional development course from Aug. 11 to 13 for Maryland educators focused on the aftermath of the Holocaust.
This marks the second year the organizations are partnering to hold a Holocaust-centric professional development course, and the partners said they hope to have a different focus topic related to Holocaust education each year.
“Last year was our first year together, and it was a huge success. And we’re really excited and happy about this new collaboration and partnership. It’s just a new audience that we’re able to reach,” said Emily Goodman, the director of Holocaust and Countering Antisemitism programs at the BJC.
Goodman said Holocaust education is a staple of the BJC’s work, and they have historically served as a resource for educators in that area of study. She added that BJC has been hosting annual Holocaust educational trainings for well over a decade.
Dr. Hana Bor, a Towson University professor, Holocaust education specialist and the inaugural director of the Berman Center, said that some teachers may be excellent educators but don’t always feel they have the tools to teach the Holocaust to students.
“What I try to do is to give educators or anybody who wants to teach or learn about the Holocaust some content knowledge, some tools to teach the Holocaust, but also some comfort dealing with the topic,” Bor said.
Bor said that this year the organizations chose to focus on the aftermath of the Holocaust because it isn’t often focused on in school curriculums.
She said most units about World War II and the Holocaust wrap up with the end of the war and the liberation of the camps, but there is an unexplored area when it comes to the people who were left behind dealing with the aftermath.
“It didn’t end there [with the liberation], because those people who survived and those people who were there after the war, they had nowhere to go. So there were a lot of displaced peoples’ camps, for example, and there were the Nuremberg trials,” Bor said.
Bor said the course will consist of two days in the classroom and one day visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
During the sessions, participants will be in the classroom hearing from speakers like Jennifer Goss, a project director at Echoes and Reflections, a Holocaust education organization.
They will also get to hear from local educator Alana Snyder, a third-generation descendant of a survivor and author of the children’s book about the Holocaust, “Grandma Is a Survivor.”
On the second day, the group will take a trip to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. to explore its exhibits, artifacts and stories.
Bor said that some of the teachers may have been to the museum before, and that is something they might switch to keep relevant for future years.
Bor also said that she would be showing a film about the prosecutor for the Nuremberg trials and his life. After the film, they’ll discuss justice, the displaced peoples’ camps that kept liberated people behind barbed wire with nowhere to go and more.
She added that the curriculum will allow for a deep study of the topic and also give educators tools for the classroom and a chance to network.
Participants who successfully complete the course will also receive continuing educational credits and a certificate of completion, which is important for their careers.
Bor and Goodman said that teachers in the school system need to complete professional development courses, and this course is one way to help their careers in education while gaining important knowledge.
“About half of the teachers who participated last year took it because they needed some sort of professional development for their schools, and that fulfilled this requirement,” Bor said. “So, it was a combination of the ability to get certification for professional development and professional growth and interest or curiosity.”
This course comes at a time when data worldwide shows increased antisemitism, making continued quality education an important goal for the Jewish community. And with most learning about the Holocaust coming from classrooms, it’s vital for the BJC to ensure that teachers in the area have access to the tools necessary to deliver that quality education.
“There is so much information online, both good and bad, and I can imagine for teachers who don’t have a specialization in this topic, it can be extremely overwhelming when they’re trying to learn what resources to use in their classroom and whether or not the resources they’re finding are credible or accurate,” Goodman said. “And so it’s important to us to make sure that these teachers have good information, that they’re teaching the next generation accurate facts.”
