NC Council on the Holocaust

August 2024

By Michael Abramson, Chairman, North Carolina Council on the Holocaust

The North Carolina Council on the Holocaust teaches students about the Holocaust to prevent bullying, prejudice, and ethnic scapegoating in schools. Students model the behavior around them and believe antisemitism is a normal thing to do. Students must understand why teaching the Holocaust is necessary. They learn through the Holocaust Council that the Holocaust is not the only example of a genocide. Students learn what happened to Armenians in Turkey 25 years before the Holocaust and what happened to Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge thirty years after the Holocaust. Students learn that the Holocaust was not simply a spontaneous one-time phenomenon. As Wendy Kesser writes, "The Holocaust was a deliberate, sinister, and government-driven process of fear-mongering that persistently and methodically ate away at the foundations of human decency. First, the Jews were defined and identified. Then, they were separated. Ultimately, they were stripped of any vestige of humanity — even called 'vermin' — to make their 'extermination' logical and defensible." It is not only our responsibility as educators within the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction to teach the Holocaust, it is our moral obligation as Jews that we inherit to prevent such horrors from ever going unchecked again.