Educational initiative brings destroyed Holocaust communities to life

The corona pandemic has meant that we are learning online more now than ever. The implications of this are that schools and educators need to provide digital and online resources that are engaging and informative.

Holocaust education is no exception. It must be effective and relevant to the next generation, especially since the number of survivors is dwindling and memories are fading.

One example of how social media have been used to teach about the Holocaust is the fictional Instagram diary of Eva Heyman, a Jewish teen who lived in Hungary and was murdered in 1944. 

This project aims to make the memory of the Shoah more relevant to young people by highlighting issues to which they can relate, such as friendships, hobbies and teen crushes. Eva’s Stories now has over a million followers and 100 million views.

Other digital media platforms are being used to teach students about the Holocaust. One meme depicts a pile of discarded smartphones to draw a contemporary connection to the piles of discarded shoes featured in concentration and death camps, as monuments to those who were murdered there. 

The WikiShtetl project is another user-friendly platform designed to teach about communities destroyed during the Holocaust. Using technology to bring the past back to life, WikiShtetl is part of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia that records memories of a lost world, with articles about Jewish communities and shtetls throughout Europe and elsewhere that were damaged or lost during the Holocaust. 

WikiShtetl was established in 2017 by Dr. Tehila Hertz, who teaches education at Herzog College.

“Wikipedia has drastically changed how we learn and disseminate information, and how ideas are passed down from generation to generation,” says Hertz. “Educators need to understand the power of the digital information revolution and help students use the Internet correctly, so they can assess its credibility and challenge bias and errors.

“The increased use of Wikipedia in education means that the role of the teacher has changed – from being the sole source of knowledge to encouraging students to work independently, learn where information comes from, and find out the facts for themselves.” 

The purpose of the WikiShtetl project is “to encourage teachers and students to research communities that were destroyed during the Holocaust. By contributing information to Wikipedia, they can keep their memory alive and inform the world about what was destroyed.”

“The project is designed to use all the tools provided by Wikipedia to help with the teaching of the Holocaust and how lost communities lived. The emphasis is on keeping these communities alive by learning about them; rather than focusing on their death and destruction, we try to give them a new lease of life. 

“Instead of setting examinations for students, I decided to set their projects to learn how to submit articles to Wikipedia. Each student has to choose a community to write about. Either they have a personal connection to the community through family roots, or they may have visited on a school trip to Eastern Europe, or just heard about the community and decided to write about it.

“Using Wikipedia encourages people to engage and interact with other contributors around the globe and agree on a common text. This is a very valuable learning experience. Contributors really feel that they are giving to society and humanity. This also means that the content and views you read are balanced and include a wide spectrum of perspectives. You don’t find that in one history book with just one author.

“This joint endeavor around the writing and editing of articles on Wikipedia means that information is democratized and shared – there is a special feeling of camaraderie and togetherness.

“We no longer rely on one person or a specific group of people to write about a topic, but a whole variety of people from all over the world who don’t know each other can contribute to the same article. Wikipedia connects the whole spectrum of society across the international community. This is unique. 

“Our vision is to include Jews and non-Jews from around the globe in the WikiShtetl project. We already have many non-Jewish students in Germany writing entries and involved in the project in other ways. Students in London, Tel Aviv and Cape Town can work together on the same community and write their entry together – let’s say writing about their grandfathers who all came from the town of Ponevezh in Lithuania.”

Herzog College is a religious teacher education college in Israel. This was the second year that they ran the WikiShtetl competition, inviting high school students and amateur historians from around the world to write entries about lost communities. As a result, 70 new articles were added this year to the rapidly-expanding Wiki website. 

In October 2021, an awards ceremony for the annual writing competition was held at Yad Vashem in partnership with Wikimedia Israel and the Yad Vashem Teacher Training Department. Cash prizes were presented to the winners. They included Yanai Bakar, a 17-year-old student who wrote an article about Czernowitz in the Ukraine; a doctor of astronomy from Zurich University who wrote about Jewish communities in Odessa; and a career soldier in the IDF who contributed 1,000 listings cataloging the Jewish communities of Hungary. Many of the writers drew on their own family history for the projects.

The whole spectrum of Israeli society was represented at the awards ceremony – haredi Orthodox, National-Religious and secular – all of whom wrote about the Jewish communities from which their families originated. They were all united by their joint belief that the best way to preserve the memory of these lost communities is by recording them on digital media. 

Yanai Bakar, who is home-schooled and loves history, wrote a paper for the WikiShtetl competition that was more like a thesis, involving a hundred hours of research and reading.

“I am the grandson of a Holocaust survivor from the Chernivtsi (Czernowitz) community,” says Bakar, whose pen-name on Wikipedia is Covesh Hamelafefonim, (‘The Cucumber Pickler/Conqueror’). “I did not know my grandfather, as he died several years before I was born. 

“Since I have been editing Wikipedia articles for several years, I decided it was time to write a comprehensive and original entry, which I would dedicate to my grandfather and his community. 

Bakar says that he made time every afternoon to read all the sources and write his entry. “My background knowledge about my grandfather’s community in the Ukraine stems from a lot of reading, because I am a history buff. My mother brought me books from the local university library to help me with my research.”

Appreciating how his family encouraged him, he says: “My family said that producing a project like this is worth far more than passing the bagrut (matriculation) in history, which I was preparing for at the same time.”

Regarding his prize, he says: “Not only will I be rewarded on a personal level, but the readership will be exposed to this interesting and diverse community.”

Rabbi Dr. Yehuda Brandes, president of Herzog College, says that they aim to expand the WikiShtetl project throughout the Jewish world. “We are doing more than memorializing the communities that were destroyed”, he said. “We are also exploring the deep roots that give rise to the nation that we are today.”

Emphasizing the urgency of the project, Dror Lin, a member of the Wikimedia Israel board and a partner in the project, says: “Any information that is not found on Wikipedia today will be lost and forgotten 10 years from now.”

Thanks to Hertz and her team, Jews and non-Jews around the world can now work together to bring the communities destroyed during the Holocaust back to life again.