Israel Debates Holocaust Education For First Graders
The proposal by Israel's education minister to introduce the Holocaust into the first-grade curriculum has sparked an ethical debate about the role these studies play in shaping Israeli society.
It is almost impossible to understand the contemporary Israeli experience without assessing the central role played by Holocaust remembrance. The Holocaust is such a constant presence in the contours of Israeli society that it would be difficult to find any area where it has not left its mark. Consider this paradox: The more time passes, the greater place the destruction of European Jewry has in the conscience of Israelis, and the more intensely it affects them. Very often it even determines how they think and impacts their views about the rest of the world.
How should people relate to the Holocaust 70 years on? How much should we allow it to shape our lives today?
Is history likely to repeat itself? Is another Holocaust possible? Does Israel face an existential threat? How should the legacy of the Holocaust be passed on to the younger generation? Should the memory of the Holocaust be encouraged and if so, to what degree? Should we perhaps forget and even encourage others to forget in our unending quest for normalcy?
These questions lie at the center of Israel’s public debate over cultivating the legacy of the Holocaust. For the past 25 years, schools have been sending their students to visit the death camps in Poland. Every year, tens of thousands of high-school students take a break from their studies and make their way to these centers of destruction to get a firsthand look at how far the human capacity for evil reached under the Nazis. What began as visits by a handful of Israelis in the 1980s has evolved, over time, into enormous delegations of Jews from around the world.
