"I Witness the Holocaust"

Dick Strauss teaches award-winning Holocaust curriculum

Beth Chaverim is proud to offer the award winning curriculum, “I Witness the Holocaust” taught by Holocaust educator, Dick Strauss. It is believed to be the only full year curriculum of Holocaust study in a supplemental religious school in the entire Chicago area. Awarded a Lurie Award for Excellence in Jewish Education by the Community Foundation for Jewish Education, this curriculum spans the years 1914 through 1948 and gives middle school students a first hand account of the experiences of a variety of people in Europe. The students hear directly from a ghetto survivor, a hidden child, a death camp survivor, a righteous gentile, a Jewish resistance fighter, a liberator, a child of a survivor, and a representative from the Israeli Consulate. In addition, the students visit the Holocaust Memorial Foundation in Skokie, and the Spertus Museum in Chicago. Additionally, time permitting, the students will commemorate Yom HaShoah with a service in the spring. The students literally become the witnesses to the Holocaust, and therefore bear the important responsibility to remember, retell and do whatever they can to prevent injustice, prejudice and ultimately genocide.

The curriculum has had a lasting impact on the scores of students who have experienced it. Dick Strauss describes the importance of the curriculum: "The Holocaust was unprecedented, but now the precedent is there. One of the horrible lessons of the Holocaust is that it can happen again, it has happened to a certain extent in Rwanda, East Timor and in Kosovo. The only way for us to relay the horrors of what happened, its significance and to keep this from ever happening again is through 'honest' and universal education. When you study the Holocaust, you are studying the highest level of organized hate in the history of mankind. Studying the rise of the Nazis, their extermination of the Jews, the Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and other 'undesirables' is an exploration into how ordinary people can be led into committing the ultimate horror -- genocide. John Conway said, 'The Nazis victimized some people for what they did, some for what they do, some for what they were, and some for the fact that they were. For the dead and the living, we must remember.' This is the only way to prevent the events that took place between 1933 and 1945. Can it happen again? Yes. Can we, through knowledge and education and guts prevent it from happening again? Yes."

Dick Strauss has taught religious school for over sixteen years. He developed the curriculum as part of his advanced degree and it is the result of his studies at Roosevelt University, the University of South Florida, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Illinois Holocaust Memorial Foundation and Facing History and Ourselves, the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation, and Steven Speilberg's Shoah Foundation. He and his wife Donna are charter/founding members of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.  Dick has been honored by being admitted to the USHMM "Circle of Life,' the Museum's highest and most distinguished honor for non-survivors.

Because of the importance of the subject matter, this curriculum will be offered to interested adults as well.

Contact us for more information.