Four educators from Monmouth County were among 19 middle and high school teachers from several states chosen to take part in an advanced three-day seminar on the Holocaust in Elizabeth.

The seminar, held over the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, was sponsored by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. During the graduate-level seminar, the group studied under-researched topics and heard lectures by top Holocaust scholars, including Debórah Dwork, Robert Jan Van Pelt, Tim Cole, and Radu Ioanid.

“They challenged us to think out of the box and examine the future of Holocaust education,” said Rosemarie Wilkinson, a teacher at Raritan High School in Hazlet. “Expanding to include human rights and genocide education is where it is going. We learned how to help our students become better human beings.”
Topics included the progression of the Holocaust in Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, the Baltic states, and Romania and classroom techniques for presenting material to students.

The participants previously attended the JFR Summer Institute for Teachers, which is held at Columbia University in New York.

“This built on our previous summer program, and the participants already have an extensive knowledge of the Holocaust,” said Christine van der Zanden, the JFR’s director of education. The seminar participants, she said, “have already shown a great deal of interest in teaching the Holocaust, and we just want them to have more information.”

Also attending the seminar from Monmouth were Janice Kaposky, a teacher at Monmouth Regional High School in Tinton Falls; Dale Daniels, executive director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft; and Jane Denny, director of education at the Brookdale center and a teacher at Rumson Country Day School.

Kaposky and Wilkinson have participated in Brookdale center activities, and, along with Daniels and Denny, have taken part in JFR’s European Studies seminar. “Once you participate in that high level of study,” Daniels said, “you really want to keep going.”

Daniels said the seminar, with leading scholars in the field, offered a comprehensive look at Holocaust history and, for the participants, “raises the level of our knowledge to a level where we can ensure we are instructing the educators and students on current thinking about the Holocaust.

It was especially useful, she said, in extending their knowledge of the Holocaust beyond Germany and Poland. “What a person experienced in Italy, where they helped Jews hide, was so totally different from what someone experienced in Lithuania, where the Jews were wiped out,” she said. “When you can explain the different background, it helps the students to understand the different survivor experiences.”

Wilkinson said she plans to take much of what she learned back to her school and to use the stories of rescuers in Italy as examples of humanitarian behavior.

“I want to teach my students not to be a bystander in the hallway,” Wilkinson said. “I will make my classroom a zone of respect. Disrespect — it’s ‘common’ in the hallways of our school, and most people ignore it.”

The seminar also reinforced Wilkinson’s resolve to expose her students to the testimonials of survivors. “I need to continue to use the resources — our survivors are dying off — to use them as resources and cherish them,” she said.