Huron-Perth educators bring home lessons on hate from Holocaust education tour in Poland

Thanks to their experiences on a recent one-week Holocaust education tour in Poland, 24 educators from across Ontario, including two from the Avon Maitland District school board, have brought home lessons on combating hate for local students to learn from.

Offered through the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies’ Compassion to Action program, the annual tour invites influential Canadians on an eye-opening journey to learn about the Holocaust, racism and intolerance with the goal of teaching them about the history of anti- Semitism and empowering them to take action against hate in their communities.

For Avon Maitland District school board human rights and equity lead administrator Jason Burt and human rights and equity coach Paul Finkelstein, that will mean taking their newfound understanding of the Holocaust and implementing those lessons in classrooms across Perth and Huron counties.

“Our director of education, Dr. Lisa Walsh, went on a trip with the Simon Wiesenthal center on a two-week journey going to Poland, as well as Israel,” Burt said. “From that learning, (the center) came to our board because Lisa was definitely interested in expanding our Holocaust education because, for lack of a better word, it’s lacking. … Because we’re seeing so many incidents of anti-Semitism across the country, the education component is needed. So when (the center) came to pitch the idea of ​​sending representatives from the Avon Maitland board, Paul and I were literally texting each other through the presentation saying, ‘We want to go.’”

The trip included tours through several former concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek and Plaszow, and visits to the Oskar Schindler Factory, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising monument, the POLIN Museum and Jewish cemeteries, among other notable locations that served to share the history of the Holocaust and the stories of its victims.

“It was an intense experience from the moment we landed,” Finkelstein said. “We started right away visiting the cemetery in Warsaw, which is incredible as far as the magnitude, the size of it. … It was a full week of being deeply immersed in the Holocaust and looking at it, for me, through the eyes of a Jewish person whose family history comes from Poland. So it was a different experience for me and very impactful when, for example, we went to Auschwitz and I was able to look at the names of Finkelsteins who had passed within the concentration camp. One of those names was my daughter’s name, which sort of flashes you back to the reality if you were there.”

Equipped with their experiences on the tour, and with the support of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, Burt and Finkelstein are now working to improve the school board’s Holocaust education curriculum. They plan to reshape that course of study so it presents the history of the Holocaust and the stories of its victims as an inroads to studying and understanding hate in all its forms, whether that’s anti-Semitism, anti-Black hate, anti-2SLGBTQQIA+ hate , anti-Indigenous hate or any of the 10 categories of oppression.

“It’s looking at what happened during the Holocaust and everything leading up to it, and giving us and the community the tools to address it, to speak out and to counter actions that lead to hate or are hateful and can lead to situations like what happened during the Holocaust to the Jewish people,” Finkelstein said.

Burt said their work will provide an educational framework for examining the other nine categories of hate.

“The work that we’re putting in is a long-range approach to reducing and, hopefully, eliminating the number of racist and hate-based incidents that are occurring across our board. It has to be done through education,” he added.

As part of this improved Holocaust education curriculum, the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies’ Tour for Humanity will visit elementary schools across the school board to present its mobile museum focused on the history of anti-Semitism and hate to grades five and six and some older students across Perth and Huron counties.

“It’s an excellent way to set classes up for the new curriculum on Holocaust education, which is coming (to Grade 6 classes across Ontario) in September, and to plant the seed and to continue the conversation. This isn’t a one-off where they come to your class and away they go. We want to keep this and the other areas we work on alive and keep those discussions going so students can continue to learn and understand they have a place in fighting oppression in all its forms,” Finkelstein said.

For more information on how the Avon Maitland District school board is addressing equity, diversity and inclusion in local schools and the wider community, check out the board’s action plan at www.amdsb.ca/apps/pages/EDIplan.

[email protected]