A few weeks before the Jewish community paused to remember Kristallnacht on Nov. 9, leaders at a local synagogue asked the Holocaust Council of MetroWest to help prepare a memorial program to recall the first night of widespread Nazi violence against Germany's Jewish communities.

But the request came with a caveat.

"They asked us not to provide a survivor," said council's director Barbara Wind. She declined to identify the synagogue, but she called the attitude "disturbing."

As time passes, Wind and others involved in Holocaust education feel an increasing urgency to expose audiences to first-person accounts by survivors.

At the same time, they worry that educators and students are seeing the Holocaust as less relevant, or even "overexposed." Holocaust educators even have a term for the syndrome, "Holocaust fatigue," a term that shows up in the professional literature of Holocaust educators with increasing frequency.

"When survivors are no longer alive, it will be like everything else," said Sally Frishberg, a survivor and educator who attended a Holocaust educators' conference on Dec. 7 at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft. "There will be classes and curricula, and it will be taught. Then someone somewhere will say, ‘I once met a survivor,' and that will last for awhile."

"It's a phenomenon describing people who are saying ‘Enough already with this Holocaust,'" said Wind, paraphrasing some community members she speaks to. "‘We've heard about it, we know about it, we're bored. Let's go on to something else.'"

More troubling still, Wind added, is that "to a large degree, it is Jewish teenagers who are saying this. Many are in the day schools, where they have heard about and have been commemorating the Holocaust all of their lives, probably."

Simone Schweber, associate professor of education and Jewish studies at Stanford University in California, discussed the syndrome in a 2006 article, "‘Holocaust fatigue' in teaching today." According to Schweber, it was once difficult to teach the Holocaust because the subject matter was treated as sacred or hallowed. More recently, the sheer volume of films, artwork, museums, and testimonials has created an opposite challenge. "Where I once worried that the sanctification of the Holocaust stifled learning," she wrote, "I now worry that trivialization of the Holocaust impedes its understanding."

Many educators are distressed by the notion of "Holocaust fatigue."

And some Jewish thinkers suggest that the Jewish community puts too much emphasis on the Holocaust, thereby running the risk of alienating young people. In a 2006 article in the Jewish journal Sh'ma, an Israel-based writer who uses the pen name Ahad La'am said that emphasis on Holocaust education suggests that Jews are "obsessed with death, not life."

Educators are preparing for the inevitable moment when there are no more survivors alive to tell their tales. Until then, they are working hard to impress teachers, synagogue leaders, and other educators that the lessons of the Shoa must be conveyed, to Jewish and non-Jewish audiences alike.

Even in Jewish day schools, where the lessons of Jewish history are presumably infused throughout the curricula, the study of the Holocaust must compete with a range of topics.

"Having a dual curriculum already puts a great deal of pressure on the educators to try to cover everything," said Romanian-born Alice Klein, a child of survivors who chaired the board at the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in Livingston between 2001 and 2003.

"Our goal is to give a well-rounded education," said Klein. "So the question is, how do you incorporate the Holocaust? There is so much information they need to cover. The key has to be that the teacher has to be very much in tune with Holocaust education. If we don't do that, we are our own worst enemies."

At the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, educators are being challenged to come up with new ways to teach the Holocaust in the day schools.

"Teachers approach us saying, ‘I do need new ways to get this material across' — especially in the Jewish day schools, where the kids grow up hearing about the Holocaust," said the museum's public relations manager, Betsy Aldredge.

Since April, "the museum's outreach to schools has taken a new direction," said Paul Radensky, its educator for Jewish schools. He said his mission is to organize training seminars for teachers in yeshivot, day schools, and synagogue afternoon school programs.

"We are pushing a look at the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective," he said.

"A Jewish perspective would be ‘How did the Jews respond?' In Germany, the Jews created schools and social relief organizations. In Poland, they set up soup kitchens and underground schools and libraries and hospitals. For too long, the Jewish perspective has not been taught."

Paul Winkler, executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, agreed.

"In the day schools, I think we have to teach it with the feeling that they are Jewish children, and we have to show that it is more of a responsibility of Jewish youths to continue to tell the story. They have the responsibility to make sure it is never forgotten.

"If I were the principal of a day school or synagogue," he said, "I would have a goal of mine that somehow our youth take a special responsibility to carry this story out. I'm not saying the rest of the world doesn't have the responsibility, but the Jews have a special need; they must be the ones to tell this story."

For supplementary Jewish schools, held on Sundays and after school, the limited hours only increase the challenge.

"Our experience with the day schools down here has been positive, but not as positive with the after-school Jewish schools, where the kids are not as invested in the program," said Dale Daniels, executive director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brookdale Community College. "They have so many other after-school activities that they are not really invested in Hebrew school. So we're not that successful with them."

Miriam Peled of Flanders, who teaches Hebrew at Ramapo College and, on occasion, the Holocaust in the after-school program at Temple B'nai Abraham in Livingston, had a different take. "I don't think I would call it Holocaust fatigue," she said. "I would say we maybe have to rearrange the way we present or approach the subject."

Few states can match New Jersey in the range or depth of its Holocaust education. The state mandates the teaching of the Shoa in the schools, a process overseen in part by the NJ Commission on Holocaust Education. There are Holocaust resource centers at colleges and universities around the state, including Rutgers, Stockton, the College of St. Elizabeth, Kean, and Rider.

Lauren Schaefer, a high school teacher in North Carolina who helped design a schools curriculum for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (see sidebar below), said such efforts must engage students.

"Many teachers are teaching the Holocaust all the time and the kids, if they get it in elementary school and middle school, by the time they get to me in high school, they say, ‘Oh, no, not the Holocaust again,'" she said. "You have got to find ways to make it relevant at every grade level and get the kids involved in their education. They like to be able to find the answers themselves. Too often they are just told the answers."

---