HALES CORNERS — Students are growing
up in a more diverse world than ever before, and Catholic
teachers are embracing opportunities to share programs
with their classes on different religions, cultures, ethnic
groups and their histories. From Muslim speakers to visits
to the Holocaust Museum, Milwaukee educators opened the
world to their classes this past school year. One educational
program is called the “Holocaust Materials Trunk.”
Several suitcases full of videos, books, posters and maps
showed eighth graders at St. Mary School, Hales Corners
how the Holocaust affected Jewish people, on a personal
level.
Put together by the Holocaust Education and Resource Center,
Milwaukee and sponsored by the group’s umbrella
organization, the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the displays
share history with area students.
St. Mary Elementary School was one of the first schools
to acquire the trunks for several weeks during the school
year.
Eighth grade religion teacher Judy Nelson and eighth grade
English teacher Jude Kosmider shared the trunks with their
students.
“We fed off one another,” said Nelson of the
suitcase materials.
For example, Nelson said she gave each student a picture
and a biography of a young person who lived during the
Holocaust period. They developed that child through different
experiences of the Holocaust, during Kosmider’s
writing classes, said Nelson.
Kosmider said the students also studied “The Diary
of Anne Frank” and had studied “To Kill a
Mocking Bird’ with a focus on the oppression of
a people. Some of the students wrote that they saw a correlation
between oppression of the blacks in “To Kill a Mocking
Bird” and the oppression of Jews in the Holocaust,”
she said.
The eighth graders were” very engrossed” in
the movie about Anne Frank, said Kosmider. “They
saw connections we wanted them to see,” she said.
They realized the novel we read (“To Kill A Mocking
Bird”) and the movie they saw — that both
genres — were fiction. They realized in this historical
fiction these characters represented real people and the
devastating effects of hatred.” Nelson, who taught
a unit on morality in religion, said during their sharing
of the Holocaust materials, students realized individuals
are responsible for their own actions.
Heather White, a 2003 graduate of St. Mary, was impressed
by a documentary Nelson showed, with testimonials of Holocaust
survivors.
“The video stood out in my mind as especially moving,”
recalled White. “In this video there were real stories
of grown women and men who survived the Holocaust. The
survivors tell their childhood stories. I found this touching
because I learned how the Jewish people suffered. To hear
each survivor’s personal story made me feel sympathy
for those persecuted, in a personal way,” she noted.
In addition, Nelson said the children related well to
a video entitled “The Devil’s Arithmetic.”
In that video, a girl travels back in time reliving her
ancestors’ lives during the Holocaust. Nelson said
she sensed her students were “somewhat relieved
they didn’t have to go back through time themselves,”
but could learn of this outrage through the girl’s
eyes.
“I think the further removed generations become
from the atrocities of the Holocaust, the greater the
need there is for us as educators to provide an opportunity
for our students to become aware of history in a meaningful
way,” said Kosmider.
Perhaps the trunk material provided a greater global awareness
for them as members of society, she added.
Nelson, who said she began the year studying Muslims in
her religion class, and then went into the Holocaust,
hopes to have the Holocaust Trunk for a longer period
of time this school year.
According to Melissa Kerbel, coordinator for the Holocaust
Education and Resource Center, the suitcase materials
are especially “geared to middle school students.”
Director of the Holocaust Education and Resource Center
Amy Shapiro, an Alverno College professor, said the group
is working to get a second set of trunks available for
classes. |
