A conversation with Helen Kirschbaum
NJEA Review Associate Editor Kathryn Coulibaly met with Helen Kirschbaum, director of the Esther Raab Holocaust Museum & Goodwin Education Center at Cherry Hill’s Jewish Community Relations Council to discuss all it has to offer to NJEA members and their students. Below is an edited transcript of what Kirschbaum shared.
We’ve been sending Holocaust survivors to talk to students for more than 25 years. Our speakers have gone into classrooms, community organizations, schools and colleges. Some schools come to us because we have a small museum featuring artifacts from the Holocaust and highlighting the history of the period.
Unfortunately, as time has gone on, there are fewer and fewer survivors who are able to speak. We have started to rely on their children and grandchildren to share their family stories. We ask them to speak at the schools or at our center or, since COVID, on Zoom.
Not just a history lesson
We encourage our speakers to share their family legacies. They talk about the importance of why we still need to be talking about what happened 70 to 80 years ago. We try to make sure people understand this is not just a history lesson. There’s so much to learn from what happened when hatred was allowed to be taken to unimaginable extremes.
Jeff Zeiger is one of many children of survivors who speak for us and carry on their family stories. Every one of them does it differently. Some, like Jeff, will speak without any aid of any kind. Others have developed ways to use parts of their parents’ recorded testimony and will share segments of those testimonies and then fill in more of the story.
There’s also a play that we’ve been sharing for at least 15 years that is the story of one of the survivors who settled in South Jersey. We have that play performed in our center or at schools and then survivors’ children or grandchildren come to each performance and answer students’ questions. The play is historically accurate, so it’s another way of telling that survivor’s story.
We work with the school to make it affordable. Our goal is to share the story.
It’s so important to the survivors for students to hear them and understand what happened. They want students to realize that they have a responsibility to make sure that the world that they live in does not become like the world that Holocaust survivors came from.
Maintaining programs and training educators
We ask for contributions to our education program in honor of the survivors. Those contributions allow us to maintain the museum, send out speakers and give tours to school groups.
We offer teacher training programs. We partner with the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. We don’t want to recreate the wheel. We just want to connect schools with the right program.
We have an amazing team of volunteers, most of whom are retired teachers. That enables us to go into a school and do a teacher training program that meets the specific needs of the school. There are many teachers who are not comfortable dealing with the difficult subjects that arise when teaching the Holocaust. We want to help them and provide them with the resources and materials and let them ask questions in a comfortable, safe setting.
We also have donors who have given us funds specifically to take teachers to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. We do that once a year. We have a bus filled with teachers and it’s an amazing opportunity for the teachers to meet educators from other districts who are teaching the same things they are and walk through the museum with them.
In the past, we always had survivors go with us, so that was an opportunity to meet survivors and speak to them one on one.
We’ve had other donors who are working to send high school students to Washington, D.C. We’ve connected with schools in the area and sent students to the Holocaust Museum. We send one of our educators with them to answer questions as they walk through the museum.
When we go to D.C., we also take those students to the World War II memorial. For many years, we had concentration camp liberators who spoke for us. Unfortunately, they are no longer alive.
We also go to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial because hate against anyone is not acceptable and that’s part of the lessons that we share with students. Hate in any form has to be eliminated from our communities.
We are one of 30 centers throughout New Jersey that are part of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education. Each of those centers offer various programs and a unique focus. We all work in different areas.
For Holocaust Remembrance Day we provide programming that is open to the public. We also provide speakers for programs that other organizations may be holding. For example, one of our speakers went to Fort Dix and spoke to the service members there. We’ve also sent speakers to synagogues, schools and other venues in the area.
Incidents of intolerance as teachable moments
We also work with our local schools if they have incidents of anti-Semitism or hate of any kind. We can work with the individual student who is the offender or the entire grade level. We have developed programming that talks about the consequences of anti-Semitism or other hateful action.
Sometimes it’s a parent who will call us and say their child had an issue at school. Then I will reach out to the principal. Other times, it’s the principal, guidance counselor or anti-bullying coordinator who asks for assistance.
I think it’s important for schools to use these incidents as teachable moments. Don’t just say, “That’s terrible; I can’t believe it happened here,” and move on. We need to take a minute and address what happened—not by focusing on the perpetrator, but as part of a conversation. You know if an incident happens in a school, all the kids have heard about it, whether the staff is talking about it or not.
There are so many lessons in those individual incidents. Do you stand by and let it happen or do you support your friend who is being attacked for their religion, skin color, hair color or some other characteristic? Are you grateful that it didn’t happen to you, or are you strong enough to say, it’s not OK to pick on that child, my friend?
We’ve had survivors go in and talk to kids who had drawn swastikas. Sometimes, they’re just doing it for attention, but for a survivor, that swastika represents so much. We want students to understand their actions’ impact on other people.
Panel discussions and speakers
We have organized panel discussions in the community with religious leaders of different faiths and who spoke individually about how hate has impacted them. It’s not only people who are Jewish who are impacted by hate; it’s all people of all faiths and all colors. And students can learn from hearing these stories.
We’ve had politicians join us. I will always remember the day Rep. Andy Kim joined us from the Capitol on Zoom and he spoke to us about how hate impacted him as a child. He panned the camera up so we could see the dome of the Capitol as he spoke. It has nothing to do with politics; it has to do with people’s feelings and behavior.
Truly, the people and schools we work with are always so appreciative of having the resources available to them. But there are so many schools who don’t know these resources are available.
We work in Camden, Burlington and Gloucester counties. Occasionally, we will expand beyond that. We try not to impinge on each other’s regions. Practically, it becomes really difficult to ask a survivor to get in the car and travel long distances.
The youngest survivors are in their late 80s. We have a survivor in our community who has celebrated his 104th birthday.
These memories that we are asking them to share bring back such terrible nightmares for them. It is extremely emotional for them. They say, I’m not retelling what happened; I’m reliving what happened. But they will do it as much as they can for today’s students—our future leaders—to understand the consequences of hate and indifference.
I’ve been very fortunate to hear from more Holocaust survivors than I would have ever dreamed, and I’ve learned so much from them. Every story of survival and loss is totally different. The one thing they all have in common is their lives were changed forever because hate and indifference ruled the society they lived in.
I think we need to emphasize to our students that empathy is more important than apathy.
The Holocaust and genocide education mandate
We have also started a program for elementary school students because Holocaust education is mandated K-12. For the younger grades, we have a collection of books that deal with kindness, accepting differences and standing up to bullies. They are age-appropriate for each grade level.
We send readers into schools, and they share these stories with students. Then they do a project or have a conversation or sing a song that ties together the book and the lessons that we want the students to learn about accepting people who may be different from them, in any way. Religion, hair color, country of origin, and other qualities are all differences that should bind us together, not tear us apart.
More to learn
Holocaust Commission Resource Centers
The New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education has 30 Holocaust Resource Centers located throughout the state. These Resource Centers provide materials, professional development, and educational programs to students, schools and educators.
nj.gov/education/holocaust/centers
Jewish Community Relations Council of South Jersey’s Raab/Goodwin Center
jcrcsnj.org/goodwin
The NJ Department of Education
nj.gov/education/holocaust/
The NJ State Bar Foundation
njsbf.org/holocaust-education
NJEA Convention
Integrating Holocaust and Anti-Semitism Education into Curricula
Friday, Nov. 10
1-2:30 p.m.
Room 301
Presenters: Franklin Stebbins and Allison D. Connolly
Film: The Hidden Child
Friday, Nov. 10
11 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Room 303
Guest speaker: Maud Dahme, Holocaust survivor and educator