Auerbach Central Agency for Jewish Education

Holocaust Resources

Articles

YOM HASHOAH PROGRAMMING

GUIDELINES AND SUGGESTIONS

Josey G. Fisher

Consultant for Holocaust Education

 

•  A commemorative program may provide an opportunity to honor the victims of the Shoah through study, in addition to fulfilling our obligation to remember.

 

•  A morning study session, prepared according to age-appropriate guidelines, can culminate in a memorial service or assembly.

 

•  Separate programming for grades 5 through 8 and for high schools is suggested. Consider a focus on personal experiences during the Shoah – through survivor presentations, readings from diaries, memoirs, poetry or oral testimonies. Pre-war photographs as well as the art and music created in ghettos and camps provide powerful background.

 

•  Programming for K through 2, if done at all, should not be combined with upper grades. It may focus on early lessons of respect for differences. Grades 3 through 4 might include reading of poetry from “. . . I Never Saw Another Butterfly . . .” A simple candle lighting and discussion of remembrance may culminate programs for younger students.

 

•  Student responses to study sessions in the form of creative writing, art or music provide a further opportunity to process their learning. Projects can be displayed or presented in synagogues or supplementary schools. Social action rojects, based on a Holocaust education goal of tikkun olam , may be another outcome.

 

•  School/synagogue commemoration ceremonies may include:  

•  “Kaddish”

•  “El Male Rahamim”

•  “Zog Nit Keynmol” (Song of the Partisans)

•  “Ani Ma'amin” (I Believe)

•  “Eli, Eli” (from a poem by Hannah Senesh)

          •  Additional Music: pre-war Yiddish melodies, music from ghettos and camps, songs of resistance, works of the composers of Terezin

•  The lighting of six memorial candles that represent the Six Million may also represent:

     Six destroyed communities, six family members of your survivor community who perished, six forms of resistance

 

•  “Hatikvah”

 

Please consult the SERC staff and the Yom HaShoah box in the Seidman Educational Resource Center for sample programs. Contact Josey G. Fisher at 215-635-8940 , ext. 1230 for further guidance.

Artwork: "Arrival in Theresienstadt" 1942
Drawing by child artist Helga Weissova, 1929 -