The state of Holocaust education is dire, and the situation is failing survivors - opinion

In my formative years, the Holocaust was hardly mentioned, even though I was brought up in a traditional Jewish family. Not having family members who had to flee from Nazi persecution – or worse – meant that the subject almost completely passed me by as a child.

What little I knew came from television programs or films. Watching the BBC’s Panorama documentary about Auschwitz, and being totally shocked and distressed by it, is one of my earliest childhood memories.

Other than that, it simply wasn’t discussed, either in our home or in the polite circles in which we mixed. Visiting the camps in Poland, as many did, was never even mooted.

Similarly, Israel hardly featured in my youth, either. A JNF box on the kitchen side was the only connection we had to the Jewish State. We holidayed in Europe, with Israel being a place that existed solely in my imagination.

I first traveled to Israel at the age of 16 with a youth group. During the month-long tour, we visited Yad Vashem, which sadly, barely made an impression on my younger self. I just didn’t feel the connection that others felt on their first visit. Perhaps my ignorance, coupled with the frivolity of youth, made it hard for me to process the horrors of the exhibits laid before me.

My thirst for knowledge and real stories involving real people was never satisfied, however.

Until my 30s, I had never even met a Holocaust survivor. Determined not to let my own children grow up with little to no knowledge of the Holocaust, or Israel, as I had, one of their first trips was to the Jewish state - where we visited Yad Vashem as a family.

Although they were at an age that some might consider too young to visit this museum, we decided to go ahead with it nevertheless. My husband, who himself is particularly knowledgeable about the Holocaust, guided us, tailoring his commentary to his young audience. Needless to say, our decision to introduce them to the Holocaust at such tender ages was vindicated, as both they and I got a lot out of the visit.

We repeated this visit after we made aliyah when they were slightly older. Much of what they’d learned on the first tour of the museum had stuck with them – this became clear as we walked around for the second time.

While we didn’t want our children to become obsessed with this dark chapter in our history, it was important for us to introduce them to it from an early age. Learning about this pivotal part of their heritage and how it led to the creation of the State of Israel, which we now call home, was crucial for their overall development, we felt.

Unlike me, my children also learned about the Holocaust in school, where it forms part of the syllabus in Israel (as it does in some other countries).

What is the state of Holocaust education outside of Israel?

OUTSIDE ISRAEL, however, the ignorance surrounding the Holocaust is “alarming,” according to a recent article in The Economist. A new poll by the magazine, in conjunction with YouGov, discovered this troubling trend: “One in five young Americans thinks the Holocaust is a myth,” screamed the headline.

The body of the article expands on this grim statistic, leaving the reader with no doubt that the importance of “raising awareness about the history of antisemitism and the Holocaust,” is crucial, as Yad Vashem stressed that same month.

The poll found that “Some 20% of respondents aged 18-29 think that the Holocaust is a myth, compared with 8% of those aged 30-44. An additional 30% of young Americans said they do not know whether the Holocaust is a myth.”

This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, as surveys “among millennials and Generation Z” carried out over the past five years, such as one by NBC NEWS in 2020, showed that many young adults were “unclear about the basic facts of the [Holocaust],” with almost three-quarters ignorant of the fact that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, “and over half of those thought the death toll was fewer than two million,” the news channel reported.

Education, or a lack thereof, cannot be blamed for this staggering statistic surrounding “one of modern history’s greatest crimes,” says The Economist. “In our poll, the proportion of respondents who believe that the Holocaust is a myth is similar across all levels of education,” it confirms.

So, who, or what is to blame? While there is no definitive answer, it suggests that social media is culpable in no small way: “Social media sites are rife with conspiracy theories, and research has found strong associations between rates of social-media use and beliefs in such theories.”

THIS IGNORANCE has provided the perfect breeding ground for the spread of lies and misinformation since the Hamas attack on October 7. There’s been a massive surge in antisemitism since that dark day, with numerous calls for killing Jews, as well as Hitler and Holocaust references.

Such calls aren’t just from ignorant, uneducated, lumpen elements in society, however. The rot goes much deeper and has spread among the highly educated who don’t dispute that the Holocaust happened – and even commemorate it. These seemingly knowledgeable people display their ignorance about the Holocaust by drawing an equivalence to the Palestinian cause. In order to properly understand the Holocaust, one must appreciate its unique nature, namely, that it was a deliberate, systematic attempt to destroy world Jewry. The death factories built by the Nazis for this sole purpose have never been replicated anywhere in the world, either before or since. That educated people can equate the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) with the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS), and suggest that Israel is the new Nazi Germany, is a travesty demonstrating a complete lack of knowledge or a total misunderstanding.

Some of the blame for this must lie at the door of the educators who should stress, time and again, the uniqueness of the event, rather than opting for the message that it has “universal significance.”

This desperate need to be inclusive and with it, the dilution of the particularist lessons of the Holocaust into a universalist approach is at the root of the problem. Once the Holocaust was accepted as one out of a series of genocides it was almost inevitable that, sooner or later, it would be suggested (and in some quarters accepted) that its latest iteration is the “Palestinian holocaust” and the Gaza “genocide.”

While we are outraged and must challenge and counter this pernicious revisionism, a degree of introspection would not go amiss.

A proper soul-searching ought to lead to the conclusion that something must be done to alter this troubling development. The educators and the institutions tasked with teaching future generations about the Holocaust simply aren’t doing their jobs effectively and a radical rethink of approach is in order.

If we’ve learned nothing else from the past seven months, it’s this.

The writer is a former lawyer from the UK who now lives and works in Israel as a freelance writer for The Jerusalem Post.