{"id":31777,"date":"2019-02-01T03:55:03","date_gmt":"2019-02-01T11:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=31777"},"modified":"2019-01-29T16:58:12","modified_gmt":"2019-01-30T00:58:12","slug":"much-work-left-to-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2019\/02\/01\/much-work-left-to-do\/","title":{"rendered":"Much work left to do"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One\nof the displays in the exhibit Canada Responds to the Holocaust, 1944-1945,\nwhich was at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in 2016. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nearly half of Canadians are not able to name a\nsingle Holocaust concentration camp. A large number of Canadians do not know\nthat six million Jews died in the Shoah, offering up numbers like two million,\nwith nearly one in four admitting outright that they just don\u2019t know. Among\nmillennials, those aged 18 to 34, the numbers are particularly disturbing: 22%\nhave not heard of the Holocaust or are not sure whether they have (which seems\nlike much the same thing). One in three Canadians thinks that this country had\nan open immigration policy for Jewish refugees in the 1930s, unaware that very\nfew Jews were permitted into Canada in the lead up to genocide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are some of the details found in a survey conducted on behalf of the Azrieli Foundation and the Claims Conference. The study was based on 1,100 interviews of Canadians to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day Sunday. (See story, \u201cEmerging from terrible abyss<\/a>. \u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the positive side, 85% of respondents said\nit\u2019s important to keep teaching about the Holocaust in order to prevent such a\nthing from happening again, while 82% said that all students should learn about\nthis part of history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In reality, it is unlikely that all Canadian\nstudents will learn about the Holocaust. In British Columbia, for example, the\nHolocaust only became part of the core curriculum with the overhaul of the\nentire provincial curriculum three years ago \u2013 and only if the teacher chooses\nto include it. The history of genocide is one module that teachers are able to\nselect from a range of subject components at particular grade levels.\nTherefore, it is still a crapshoot whether a student graduating from the\nBritish Columbia education system will have much or any knowledge on the\nsubject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is extraordinarily unlikely that the\ncurriculum will be revised again any time soon to make Holocaust education\nmandatory across the system. Educators complain, with good reason, that they\nare expected to teach more content than there are hours in a day. Competing\nneeds, including career preparation and life skills, contend with subjects like\nhistory for class time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Canada, where the educational curriculum is\ndetermined by every province, similar discussions take place across the country\nand a patchwork of curricula exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, a massive shift in the larger\nculture has taken place, eliminating what had been, until the last few decades,\na largely shared body of knowledge. In the days when there were only a couple\nof television networks, and hard copy newspapers were most people\u2019s sources of\ninformation, everyone would generally be aware of similar issues and events.\nHalf of all televisions in the United States in 1978, for example, were tuned\nin to the nine-and-a-half-hour miniseries Holocaust (a program that was\nadmittedly not without its critics among Jews, historians and others).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The internet and the proliferation of cable TV\nchannels has refracted our attention in unlimited directions. People now\nlargely self-select the information they receive and that can blind us to\nmatters outside of our spheres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a better world, knowledge of the Holocaust\nwould be universal. In the world we live in, it remains vital to continue to\nfocus attention on the subject whenever possible \u2013 and to use this history to\neducate about other genocides and violations of humanity while not diminishing\nthe uniqueness of the Shoah itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Organizations devoted to the critical work of\nHolocaust education, including the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, are\ncarrying a heavy burden for the larger society and depend on public support to\nmeet their mandate. The Azrieli Foundation, which undertook this study,\npublishes survivor memoirs and funds a variety of Holocaust-related projects\nacross Canada. Other groups, to varying degrees, share the burden of teaching\nthis history, including universities, synagogues, Hillels, book publishers and\nauthors, and so forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unquestionably, the most powerful form of\nHolocaust education is firsthand testimony from survivors and witnesses.\nBritish Columbians who are survivors of the Holocaust have spoken to tens of\nthousands of students but, in a handful of years, this method of transmitting\nhistory will no longer be possible. Innovative strategies are being developed,\nsuch as the New Dimensions in Testimony oral history project, a collaboration\ninvolving Steven Spielberg\u2019s USC Shoah Foundation, which includes holographic\nrepresentations of survivors with whom students and others can interact\nvirtually. This project recognizes that the issue is not only to continue\neducating, but to find ever-advancing means of doing so effectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The breadth of the challenge was underscored by Prof. Jan Grabowski,\nwho delivered the Rudolf Vrba Memorial Lecture at the University of British\nColumbia last November. He and a team of scholars and researchers are visiting\ntown and city archives across Poland, doing primary research on the events that\nled to the murder of three million Jews in that country. In other words, we\u2019re\nstill compiling the most basic facts of that history and, it may be safe to\nsay, we are just as far away as ever as to understanding the larger moral\nquestions \u2013 How? Why? \u2013 the Holocaust raises. Much work remains to be done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the displays in the exhibit Canada Responds to the Holocaust, 1944-1945, which was at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in 2016. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay) Nearly half of Canadians are not able to name a single Holocaust concentration camp. A large number of Canadians do not know that six million Jews died in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31778,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[3157,3076,2791,53,2364],"class_list":["post-31777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-ji","tag-canada","tag-education","tag-genocide","tag-holocaust","tag-vhec"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}