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Nov. 23, 2007
Holocaust awareness
Hillel students teach, learn about Shoah.
ARASH BEN SHAUL
Every year, Vancouver Hillel Jewish Students Association of University of British Columbia holds a Holocaust Awareness Week for the university at large. This year, the JSA commemorated the Holocaust in a four-day event titled Vancouver Schindler Jews. It was held from Nov. 13 to 16 on UBC campus and consisted of a variety of educational programs about the Holocaust, ranging from a display booth to a Shabbat dinner with Holocaust survivors.
This year's event was named Vancouver's Schindler Jews to recall not only the horrors but also to celebrate the humanity that prevailed in spite of the atrocities. Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who was a member of the Nazi party, saved more than 1,100 Jews from the concentration camps. Four of those whom he saved from Nazi persecution eventually settled in Vancouver.
Commenting on the reasons for holding Holocaust Awareness Week, Eyal Lichtman, director of Vancouver Hillel, emphasized that they want to make sure that people remember the consequences of intolerance and the cost of indifference. "'Never again' is a sacred obligation for Jews and for non-Jews in the shadow of the Holocaust," he said, "The lessons of the Shoah have tragically not been fully learned by humanity, as recent catastrophic events have indicated."
Hillel students set up a Holocaust education booth at the centre of UBC campus every day for the duration of the event. The booth contained giant poster images of some of the victims, several informational placards and a projector that played clips from Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List.
The placards tracked the lives of the four Jews who were on Schindler's List and there were posters about Schindler's life and the personal risks he took to protect as many Jews as he could from the Nazis. The pictures concluded with images of more recent atrocities, such as the genocides in Darfur and Rwanda – to remind the audience that hatred and intolerance are not nearly extinct.
Students constantly stopped by the booth to view the pictures and talk to the Hillel students at the booth. "You don't really understand the disaster of Holocaust until you run into an event like this," said Melissa Grant, a fourth-year biology student at UBC who visited the booth. "We don't talk about these important things in our classes. We need things like this."
The main part of Holocaust Awareness Week was a 24-hour vigil held in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. Hillel students read aloud the names of those murdered in the Holocaust for 24 continuous hours, outside of the UBC Student Union Building.
The concluding program of the week was a Shabbat dinner, where Holocaust survivors and students shared their stories and impressions.
Rachel Glass, a third-year undergraduate student who helped organize the event, said that this year had a unifying theme that made the message of the Holocaust more clear and powerful.
"We didn't want to give just general information. [We've done] that every year," said Glass, "We decided to bring attention to the individual victims instead."
Glass and her fellow organizers focused on presenting the personal tragedies of individual victims because they were concerned that mere facts and figures failed to capture the true extent of human suffering caused by the Nazis. And their strategy seemed to have worked, as audience turnout for most programs was much higher than expected. "A lot of people were very interested, students asked to get more involved, to get more information," said Glass of the reaction to this year's Holocaust Awareness Week. "A lot of them promised to come to other events," she continued, "and you don't really expect them to show up, but they did."
Glass emphasized that, regardless of the format of the event, the main purpose of Holocaust Awareness Week remains the same: to educate the community about the Holocaust so that it never happens again. Lichtman agreed: "Over the years, Vancouver Hillel students have educated literally hundreds of thousands of students about the Holocaust," he said, "This is world-altering work. If we are to find peace in the world, people have to understand the history of our people."
Lichtman, who is himself the son of a Holocaust survivor, observed that there are far too many people arriving on university campuses without any knowledge of the Holocaust, save for its name. He considers the student-organized Holocaust Awareness Week vital.
"Our students are leaders in peer education," he said. "Holocaust education is just one of the many programs Vancouver Hillel operates, but few give me the sense of pride I feel when I see our students opening the hearts and minds of their fellow students."
Arash Ben Shaul is a Vancouver freelance writer.
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