In some public school classrooms, one history teacher could spend 15 minutes teaching about the Holocaust, whereas another could take two weeks — it’s up to a teacher’s discretion. And “lots of” English language learners at Heritage High School in Leesburg, Virginia, have never heard of the Holocaust.
Loudoun County Public Schools is supporting a Holocaust education seminar in Northern Virginia from Aug. 5-9 for teachers due to the increasing need for awareness of antisemitism, seminar leader Nicole Korsen said.
The seminar, “Bringing Human Rights Into the Classroom Through Exploration of the Holocaust and Local Histories of Racial Injustice,” hosted by The Olga Lengyel Institute, invites educators to learn best practices for teaching the Holocaust, antisemitism and other human rights issues in the United States.
Korsen said 25 teachers came to Heritage High School from North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey as well as Virginia for the five-day seminar.
“Twenty-five teachers could each have upwards of 100 students, so even if just the teachers in this classroom [spent more time teaching the Holocaust], think about how many more students we could reach with more education,” Korsen said. “It’s like an exponential thing.”
Topics covered at the seminar include how to have difficult conversations in the classroom, guidelines for teaching the Holocaust, teaching the Holocaust using diaries, antisemitism and Jewish culture.
On the first day of the seminar, participants heard from Danyael Graham, Loudoun County’s social science supervisor, who discussed the Israel/Palestine curriculum that rolled out in LCPS in spring 2024.
On Aug. 6, participants spent a day in Washington, D.C., touring the Anti-Defamation League headquarters and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum.
Shayna Meisel, the education director for the D.C. region of the ADL, said data from the ADL show how necessary this education is.
“In ADL’s 2023 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents … we saw a 135 percent increase in antisemitic incidents in non-Jewish K-12 schools. Nearly 560 of those incidents included a swastika symbol,” Meisel wrote in a statement. “By welcoming educators into our D.C. office, we hope to demonstrate the need for antisemitism and Holocaust education in schools, while presenting the numerous resources ADL can offer students and teachers throughout the academic year.”
She noted that rather than solely viewing minority groups through lenses of oppression and bias, schools should also explore and celebrate Jewish identity.
Participants took a bus tour of Loudoun County African American historical sites on Aug. 8. The seminar closed with a Shabbat dinner and service at Congregation Sha’are Shalom in Leesburg.
Julia Berg, a seminar leader and TOLI facilitator, said Holocaust education is lacking in some public schools.
“A lot of teachers shy away from challenging content because [it’s] so difficult to address,” said Berg, who teaches world history in Wicomico County. “We think it’s really important to empower teachers with the knowledge and the skills and the pedagogy to feel comfortable teaching those issues to their students and confronting those things in the classroom.”
Korsen said teaching about the Holocaust was stifled in Virginia public schools in part due to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s 2022 tip line, which invited parents to report when their children were being taught supposedly “divisive” topics in school, such as systemic racism or inequality. The tip line was shut down later that year.
According to Berg and the TOLI slogan — “‘Never again’ starts in the classroom” — students must learn the mistakes of the past to prevent them from reoccurring.
“If the entire purpose of learning history is to make sure that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past, we have to learn about those mistakes,” Berg said. “We have to learn about the dangers of hatred and antisemitism and racism if we’re going to do the work to prevent them in the future.”
Berg said it’s more important than ever to teach about the Holocaust and the events leading up to the Holocaust, especially with the global rise in antisemitism today.
“Those trends are disturbing to someone who understands history, someone who has seen similar themes at other times in history and knows where they can lead if not checked,” Berg said. “We have to teach educators how to be brave enough to confront those issues because it’s our students who are the future. They are the ones who are going to inherit this world, and they need to know what happened before.”
Jim Rose is the executive director of NoVaChai, one of the TOLI program’s sponsors. Rose said he founded the organization to support local Jewish students in February after a “growing number of antisemitic incidents” at Northern Virginia high schools.
Rose, a Fairfax County father, said he heard that some high school students were calling their peers “Nazis” and “fascists” for demonstrating their support of Israel. He hopes that through this seminar, teachers can educate their students on the meanings and historical significance of these labels.
Both Rose and Berg spoke to the dwindling number of Holocaust survivors and how the coming generations may not get the opportunity to hear a Holocaust survivor share their story firsthand.
“We are, unfortunately, entering a time where we’re losing our survivors. We’re losing our eyewitnesses,” Berg said. “When the eyewitnesses disappear, we are in danger of forgetting. We’re in danger of Holocaust denial. We’re in danger of Holocaust distortion.”
Korsen, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, shared her father’s story with the seminar group. The group also heard from Al Münzer, a Holocaust survivor, over Zoom.
Many of the participating educators are not Jewish, Korsen said, adding that some of these teachers applied for the seminar to learn more about an unfamiliar topic.
Berg said TOLI seminars were originally created using the National Writing Project as a model. Participants in this seminar were asked to write seven reflections in response to prompts based on the guest speakers and topics covered.
“TOLI’s program does a really great job of cultivating vulnerability among its participants,” Berg said. “We include a lot of very personal writing in our programs, giving participants an opportunity to process what they’ve learned through writing and through sharing that writing with one another. There’s a lot of personal introspection.”
“This isn’t just Holocaust education; it’s human rights education,” Korsen said.
