Euroasian Jewish News

Letter to EAJC President on the support of the “Lessons of the Holocaust” program

To EAJC President

Mr. Mikhail Mirilashvili

Dear Mr. Mirilashvili,

In the fall of 2017, the EAJC Kyiv office presented the Program Commission with a project application concerning the “Lessons of the Holocaust” program. These were approved by the EAJC Program Commission but have so far not received a formal reply on whether they will be financed or not.

This program has been implemented by the EAJC Kyiv office since 2002, and before that there was an older “Lessons of the Holocaust” program which began in 1997, and which was held together by VAAD Ukraine and the Center for Jewish Education.

The necessity of this program is visible at each seminar, because unfortunately, if the history of the Holocaust is taught at all in post-Soviet countries, it is only taught as either a part of global history, or as part of that country’s specific history. A teacher who believes teaching the history of the Holocaust to be important for the fostering of a new generation can find it hard to learn about the topic on their own. Additionally, the teacher often does not feel themselves to be ready to raise such a complext topic as the Holocaust, with its heavy informational, methodological, and psychological load, in class seriously, and thus restricts themselves to the scarce smattering of facts provided by most textbooks.

Our program implies a system of seminars which are held in several stages. During their time at the program, the teacher receives a grounding in the basic theoretical methods used to understand the Holocaust and becomes acquainted with methodological materials and ways of presenting the Holocaust to school children. Additionally, all stages of the program always include time for lectures and classes on local material and the history of the local Jewish community. Local researchers and historians are invited to the program to teach. The Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies has been and remains our regular partner, which provides the meat of the material and methodology for the seminars.

Thus, over 25 seminars for teachers of the humanities and social sciences, and first and foremost for teachers of history, hav been held since 1997. Over 2000 teachers from different post-Soviet countries have gone through the program.

But the program’s activity is not limited to organizing and holding seminars. It also constantly works with our graduates with the aid of local coordinators, who do more than just teach the history of the Holocaust - they also foster their students’ desire to learn about it in even more depth. Together they research the Holocaust in their cities and villages, trying to learn of the fates of their compatriots and to tell that story to those living now: their peers, parents, and neighbors.

The EAJC Kyiv office understands how important these projects are, as they are aimed at fostering interethnic tolerance among teenagers and preventing anti-Semitic manifestations in the modern world. Thus, the program has always supported and encouraged the childrens’ participation in the I. B. Medvinsky research and creative works’ competition, whose annual final state takes place in Kyiv.

The seminars, the competition, the internships for teachers in Yad Vashem also have one more important aspect: an exchange of experience between teachers, some of whom come from different countries.

Since 204, the EAJC Kyiv office has been implementing this program with the financial support of the Claims Conference, but the EAJC input has in any case been very substantive. Today, as there has been no response about the support of this program, there are difficulties with planning its implementation for the upcoing year and there are fears about being able to implement the program at all.

We would thus like to request that you, our President, come to a final decision on our project and inform us about the fate of our program.

We are very much looking forward to hearing from you.

Respectfully,

Nadezhda Ufimtseva