Teaching the Shoah

The Shoah Memorial in Paris is visited every year by nearly 50,000 non-Jewish schoolchildren, as part of efforts to stem rising anti-Semitism

By BERNARD EDINGER
Hall of Names at Yad Vashem 390 (photo credit: REUTERS)
Hall of Names at Yad Vashem 390
(photo credit: REUTERS)
What does the word Shoah mean?” “Catastrophe,” instantly shoots back a tall, 15-yearold, white French girl.
“What language does the word come from?” Puzzled looks. “We don’t know.”
“And what was the Shoah?” “The extermination of the Jews,” “The killing of the Jews,” respond half a dozen young voices in a race to be the first to answer – among them a girl of Vietnamese background and two teenage black girls, clearly raised in France, based on their pronunciation, dress and mannerisms, but whose parents are from Africa.
“And who killed the Jews?” “The Germans, the Germans,” reply nearly a dozen youngsters, including some of Indian, West African and Asian origin, as well as of French ethnic stock.
The scene and the exchange, between a guide and visiting junior-high school pupils, took place this month alongside the Mur des Noms (The Wall of Names), in the courtyard of France’s imposing Shoah Memorial, set in the historic Marais district of central Paris.
On four walls, tightly-packed in long lines, are the names of the 76,000 Jews deported from France during World War II, nearly all of whom were murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
Guide Ophir Levy, 34, points to one of the many names on the wall recalling those deported in 1942. “As you see, his birth date was 1938. That means he was four years old when he was sent to the gas chamber,” he says.
“And this one was only a year old.”
Three black girls clutch each other’s arms and react instinctively, “Oh, nooooo!” The visitors, about half of them ethnic French, and half of various immigrant origins, are members of one of nearly 1,600 groups of French school pupils who visit the Shoah Memorial every year as part of their curriculum.
The school groups come from all sectors of French society. But this group was from a junior-high school in the troubled Seine- St. Denis region (population: more than 1.5 million) just north of Paris, where ethnic ghettos abound, and juvenile crime rates are sky high. The area has seen the exodus in the past decade of tens of thousands of mainly blue-collar Jews, fleeing harassment and violence from young hotheads among the area’s Muslim Arab population of several hundred thousand.
There were 614 anti-Semitic acts in France last year, compared to 389 the year before.
These acts included threats and hateful graffiti, but also 177 acts of physical violence.
The overwhelming majority of the violent acts were committed by youngsters of Arab origin, mostly in areas where blue-collar Jews live near large Muslim communities.
There were three boys of Arab origin among the group that toured the Memorial and they stayed mostly silent.
Speaking of the group as a whole, the guide Levy later tells The Jerusalem Report, “This group was of a generally good level, despite the fact that they are not socially and economically advantaged. They were positive in their attitude and were clearly well prepared by their teachers in their knowledge of the subject.
“They reacted well, and identified with the victims when it became clear to them that the overwhelming majority of Jews deported from France were poor immigrants like themselves,” Levy continues. “They identified because they too feel that they are excluded from society and victims of prejudice.
Youths of Arab origin sometimes reflect clichés about the influence or the wealth of Jews, but I show them that this is untrue. I don’t answer aggressively. I may not convince them, or change their minds entirely, but I know that hearing facts they haven’t heard before, and seeing the pictures of individual victims, especially young ones, often shakes their beliefs and prejudices.”
Levy, with a mother from Algeria and father from Morocco, has no family connection to the Holocaust, since his parents’ homelands were not occupied by the Nazis. “The determining moment for me came when I went on a threeday visit to Auschwitz as a youth organizer with the French Jewish Scouts,” he says.
Together with being a tour guide at the Memorial, he is now completing a doctorate on the depiction of the Holocaust in cinema.
“Do these visits have an effect? Even if it’s very little, it’s better than nothing. There are rarely cases of total indifference, no matter what the origin of the visitors,” he says.
“The official goal of the Memorial is to teach the Shoah, not to fight anti-Semitism,” Jacques Freidj, director of the Memorial, a statesupported, Jewish community institution with an annual budget of nearly 11 million euros (53 million shekels), which opened in 1956, tells The Report.
“But teaching the Shoah also includes teaching the consequences of anti-Semitism,” Freidj adds. “We can contribute to reducing anti-Semitism among the young by teaching the Shoah. I’m not turning a blind eye to realities, and yes, anti-Semitism does exist, especially in some tough neighborhoods with large immigrant populations. But the majority of youngsters are open to what we can bring to them.”
Since 1983, the teaching of the Holocaust has been given a major place in the compulsory history program of all French schools. It is taught when children are around 10-11, again when they are 14-15, and again, when they are 17-18.
“An odd result is that until 20 years ago, pupils knew about World War II, the Resistance and so on, but virtually nothing about the Shoah.
Today, it is the opposite,” Claude Singer, head of the Memorial’s educational programs, explains to The Report. “Many French youngsters will now accurately give you the number of Jews killed in the Shoah, where they were killed, and how. But they don’t know a thing about World War II. “This is also true in a way about French society, which long ignored the Shoah, but is now mesmerized by it,” continues Singer, noted author of several books about the Holocaust, including “Vichy, the University and the Jews.”
“I’ve heard some pretty distasteful comments by non-Jewish, former anti-Nazi fighters frustrated that the public now thinks that there were only Jews in concentration camps,” Singer says. “In fact, in France, more non-Jews than Jews were sent to concentration camps – although the non-Jews had a far higher survival rate because they didn’t have to face ‘selection’ and the possibility of going immediately to the gas chamber on arrival.
“Do we have particular problems when groups include large numbers of pupils of Muslim-Arab origin? Sometimes one feels tensions, but there are very rarely incidents and no cases of anti-Semitic hysteria. At the most, you may hear a muttered comment such as, ‘It’s exaggerated,’ or ‘It’s propaganda,’ but generally they are impressed by the place.
“We get kids from some of the most deprived, toughest ghetto areas and they’re interested. But they have no real political conscience. When a girl got up to ask me why we taught about the Shoah but made no mention of the Palestinian Nakba (the Palestinian “catastrophe” during Israel’s War of Independence), it was a white bourgeois girl from a school in a well-to-do area. Clearly, she already had formed political opinions.
“But let’s be clear. Those schools with many Muslim pupils and serious disciplinary problems where teachers cannot even teach the Shoah because it will cause an uproar in class just do not come here.” The French school curriculum allows for regular educational outings and there are multiple alternatives in the Paris area, such as visits to the Louvre art museum or the former royal palace at Versailles.
Visits to the Memorial are entirely up to the initiative of individual teachers who want to bring classes there. “A number of the teachers who come here request the visit because they have heard anti-Semitic comments among their pupils and want to halt the phenomenon instantly. They believe a visit here will help,” explains Singer.
Director Freidj explains that one major cause of misunderstanding is that many youngsters just do not know any Jews personally. Although France’s 600,000-strong Jewish community is the world’s third-largest after those of Israel and the US, French Jews make up less than one percent of France’s population.
“And especially,” says Freidj, “only a third of the 100,000 school-age young Jews in France attend state schools; another third go to Jewish schools, and a further third to private Catholic schools.”
Those who go to Jewish schools include youngsters from religiously observant families but also at least as many “refugees” from state schools in areas where there are large Arab minorities who will harass them. Those who go to Catholic schools, where religion classes are now optional, are simply there because there are no Jewish schools nearby.
Private Catholic schools, attended by about one-fifth of all schoolchildren in France, have seen their attendance double in the past generation because many ordinary French families now enroll their children there, attracted by tight discipline, good scholastic results – and the absence of working-class children of Arab origin who are seen as unruly delinquents. Well-to-do families of Arab origin send their children there for the same reasons.
In some cases, teachers who bring groups to the Memorial do so because they first came there as visitors with school groups when they were young. They were clearly impressed, as visitors are today, by its comprehensive permanent exhibit. Among the highlights is a room entirely covered from top to bottom by family snapshots, taken in happier days, of some of the 11,000 children later deported from France. The 90-minute to two-hour school visit ends there, often eliciting sighs and sometimes tears. About one-third of the groups stay for a further two hours to meet elderly concentration camp survivors, or persons who, when children, were hidden with French families, under false identities, often in isolated rural areas.
The Memorial, in coordination with France’s Education Ministry, also helps young teachers to better teach the Holocaust. “We have summer courses in Paris that last eight days, and we organize shorter courses in provincial cities. We also take 5,000 teachers and pupils on visits to Auschwitz each year,” says Freidj.
One oddity: There are virtually no visits to the Memorial by Jewish schools. The total number of Jewish schoolchildren who came in organized groups last year was about 150 (out of 50,000 schoolchildren).
France’s Jewish schools are largely run by Sephardi ultra-Orthodox movements whose relationship with the Holocaust once caused a national uproar, going way beyond the Jewish community. This was in 2000, when, in Israel, influential former Sephardi chief rabbi Ovadia Yosef described the six million victims of the Holocaust as “poor people,” but said they “were reincarnations of the souls of sinners, people who transgressed and did all sorts of things that should not be done.”
The comments sparked outrage in France because Yosef was initially backed by then- French chief rabbi Joseph Sitruk, who is, broadly speaking, one of his followers. Then, as now, Yosef wields tremendous influence over ultra-Orthodox Jews in France who are themselves also overwhelmingly of Sephardi origin. As a result, it emerged that some French Jewish schools did not mention the Holocaust at all in their curricula, tearing out pages on the subject from general school textbooks.
“I don’t think there are any Jewish schools where what he [Rabbi Yosef] said is still being repeated,” says Freidj. “And I know that many Jewish parents are shocked to realize that non- Jewish pupils in state schools now know more about the Shoah than do their own children.
The Jewish schools do not refuse to approach the issue today, but they want to do it with a religious attitude. We hope to have more visits from them in the future,” he concludes. 