E D U C AT I O N Rachel Lenard
LEARNING FROM THE PAST BUILDING STUDENT CONNECTIONS TO THE HOLOCAUST THROUGH STORYTELLING BY DEBORAH FRIPP
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achel stares calmly at us through the screen. “Caps off!” She says. “Ten thousand caps come off. Caps on! Ten thousand caps go on.” Rachel is telling a scene from Elie Wiesel’s Night. Fifteen-year-old Elie stands with thousands of other inmates at roll call in the Buna Concentration Camp near Auschwitz. They stand in the cold, waiting impatiently for their dinner. They are forced to watch as a fellow inmate, another teenager, is hanged for stealing food. This particular scene spoke to fifteen-year-old Rachel when she read the book. Rachel is not reading the scene from the book, however. She is telling it as a story, in first person and present tense. She is telling it as if she were Elie, as if she were there. We, her listeners, are there with her. 20
L’CHAIM SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE • AUGUST 2020
Building A Visceral Connection For several years, I have been trying to figure out how to teach the Holocaust in the high school program of a supplementary religious school. In 2016, my colleagues and I put together a program to teach the Holocaust in our Kindergarten through 8th grade Judaic classes. In that program, we build a solid foundation of knowledge and understanding leading up to high school. When we designed the program, I had planned for the high school portion to be the deep dive, where we taught the most difficult parts of the Holocaust, the parts that were not age-appropriate to discuss before high school. I repeatedly came up against the same problem: time. In our high school program, we get 90 minutes per week for 24 weeks in a year. Even if we devoted that entire time to the Holocaust, we couldn’t begin to scratch
the surface. About a year ago, I had a realization. Teaching the facts and figures of the Holocaust is not the job of a supplementary religious school. The job of a supplementary Jewish school is to build a personal, visceral connection between the students and the story of their people. The job of a good Holocaust program is to build that connection to the story of the Holocaust. A STORYTELLER
When I framed Holocaust education as telling a story, I knew exactly what I needed to do. I needed to talk to Jennifer Rudick Zunikoff, a storyteller and poet who for ten years co-led a class at Goucher College in Baltimore on how to tell survivor stories. Jennifer and her colleagues taught the students to interview survivors and then to
