A teacher’s view of the hardest subject to teach well

What is the appropriate age to explore one of the darkest chapters in Jewish history?

In 2014, Israel’s Education Ministry expanded its Holocaust teaching program to the entire school system, including kindergartens. The ministry explained that on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the public sphere is rife with rituals such as the minute of silence during an air raid siren that kindergarten teachers have to explain to children, so it decided the responsible course of action would be to prepare them.

I saw what this looked like when my son was aged eight and in grade three at a public school in Jerusalem. Each week, he would be given 15 spelling words to practice for the coming week. In the lead-up to Yom Hashoah, he was assigned the following words: Sad, horrible and menacing, tragedy, World War II, Europe, Nazis, to conquer the world, yellow star, hiding, ghetto/ghettos, (concentration) camp, save, help, Righteous Among the Nations, from Holocaust to revival.

I asked him if he knew what any of these words meant within the context of World War II. He gave me a blank stare, replying, “The teacher said we just need to know how to spell them, not what they mean.” I’m not sure if I felt relieved or distressed. At the same time, I lamented why the words United Nations, war crimes, human rights, and racism weren’t on the list, but perhaps I know the answer.

It is a story I think about when pondering the question of what the right age is to teach the Holocaust to children. In Israel, they begin from age six, but most Australian Jewish children only start learning about the Shoah around their Bnei Mitzvah years of 12 and 13.

There are few Jewish day schools in Australia that have history units on the 2600-year history of Iraqi Jewry or the 900-year history of Polish Jewry, yet every school has a unit on the six-year genocide of the Jewish people. Perhaps this is understandable given that proportional to the size of its population, only Israel accepted more Holocaust survivors than Australia.