Are preschoolers ready to learn about the Holocaust?
The new initiative by the Education Ministry to introduce the Holocaust into the preschool curriculum has provoked a heated debate as to whether its motives are educational or nationalist.
In an interview with the Globes newspaper on April 27, author and Holocaust survivor Uri Orlev, who wrote some of the best-known works of children’s literature about the Holocaust (including "The Island on Bird Street" and "Run, Boy, Run") was asked how to explain the Holocaust to children. “When my son was seven,” Orlev responded, “he asked me, ‘How did you escape from the Germans?’ I didn’t know how to explain it to him.” After much thought, he responded to his son with an allegory about life and death, which he originally heard from a Polish girl.
Orlev is not a great supporter of Israeli Education Minister Shai Piron’s new curriculum to begin teaching the Holocaust in preschool. “It’s not wise,” he said in the same interview. “He got a bit carried away. How can anyone tell a story like that to someone so young?”
There has been a lot of antagonism with this curriculum, as would only be expected. It has also revealed much of the dark humor that so many Israelis use to cope with the topic of the Holocaust. “We may have a big green car, / but it doesn’t go very far. / We cram all the Jews in the trunk in the back, / and go for a spin with deadly gas till they hack,” wrote one web surfer, cynically paraphrasing a well-known Israeli children’s song (about big trucks carrying Tnuva milk all over Israel).
Others were less amusing: “If they teach my grandchildren about the Holocaust in preschool, then I’ll just keep them home. … They shouldn’t grow up as Jews with a Diaspora mindset, scared of anti-Semitism and hiding in Israel out of fear and hatred of the goyim [non-Jews],” wrote one worried grandmother.
