The “how” and the “when” of this education are crucial. A son of Holocaust survivors himself, Rabbi Klein believes that the notion of the Holocaust can be introduced as early as fifth grade, but no earlier.

At this young age, there should be no gory detail and no pictures, just the general idea that some people hated and picked cruelly on Jews, who suffered in ghettos and concentration camps. Nobody wants ten-year-olds to be haunted by the nightmare of the Nazi reality, but educators believe that by understanding that our people have survived hatred and adversity, children develop awareness and confidence in two important facts: One, anti-Semitism is nothing new; and two, we are eternal, and by virtue of Hashem’s dictum, we will not be obliterated.

The history and hashkafah of the Holocaust should then be introduced in seventh grade in a more substantive way, with deeper understanding and knowledge continuing to develop throughout high school.

“I tell my students that I’m not going to scare them,” Mrs. Lobell says. “We go into depth in discussing the buildup to the Holocaust, the rise of the Nazis and their propaganda. Then, the horrors of the Holocaust are discussed, though not in detail, and never with photographs.”

As for the two kinds of students with inappropriate reactions, she begins the unit with a reminder. “To the ones who are excited, I usually only have to remind them that this is their family. That these aren’t ancient Romans fighting Carthaginians orGauls, but our People, and that those losses were so great that we still haven’t caught up to our pre-Holocaust population. It’s the only way to push back against a world where the media constantly inundates us with sensationalism and violence.”

For those who want to opt out of Holocaust studies, Mrs. Lobell explains that the children of the Holocaust couldn’t walk out or tell the Nazis that they would get nightmares. In a world where the next generation might never meet a single survivor, she tells her students that they have no right to opt out. “We have a responsibility to carry these kedoshim with us forever. This is how we can give them the respect that they deserve.”

Every school has a different program and approach to doing this. Holocaust-themed assemblies on Asarah B’Teves are just one example of when guest speakers or filmed survivor testimonies can make an impact. In addition, many schools offer a comprehensive course via weekly classes in tenth or 11th grade.

What to Teach

It might sound counterintuitive for lessons about suffering and pain, but Rav Avrohom Pam ztz”l told the Torah Umesorah team that children should walk away from lessons on the Holocaust feeling uplifted and upbeat, not depressed. This can be achieved by exploring spiritual heroism.

Students can get inspired by the myriad true instances where, for example, even young Jews sang Shabbos songs to strengthen themselves, refused to eat bread on Pesach, showed their ahavas Yisrael and loyalty to each other by protecting someone weaker, or encouraged each other not to give up and to envision the future.

Another positive focus is the rescue work, where numerous individuals like Rav Avraham Kalmanowitz and Mrs. Recha Sternbuch expended all their energies and resources to save Yidden. In addition, children can draw encouragement from the revival and rebuilding of Klal Yisrael against all odds after World War II.

All Jewish victims of the Holocaust are kedoshim (holy martyrs), targeted because they were Jewish and left this world al kiddush Hashem, yet anyone with a basic understanding of history knows that the majority of European Jewry were not Torah-observant in the years before World War II. Since the Enlightenment, movements like Haskalah, Reform, secular Zionism, Socialism, and Communism had devastated the kehillos and ensnared the youth en masse.

“We cannot teach a lie,” says Rabbi Klein. “We do not gloss over the secular Jews, and we don’t distinguish between the loss of a frum Yid or a secular Yid. Their loss is one-hundred percent as much of a tragedy. But when I train teachers, I train them to emphasize the loss of purity and tzidkus and Torah learning by talking about tzaddikim and chassidim, rebbes and roshei yeshivah and entire yeshivos.”

Just as important as what to teach is what not to teach about the Holocaust. Harrowing details should not be shared with young kids. The sadistic medical experimentation in Auschwitz is absolutely not lesson material for children or even young teens. Pictures of unclothed victims should never be shown, both out of respect for the kedoshim and to preserve the kavod of the tzelem Elokim in general.

The Groundwork and the Edifice

The teenagers who go to Poland with Rabbi Roodyn and his fellow educators, he says, initially view the Holocaust as a “big black box” of fear and destruction. They know lots of terrible things happened, but don’t understand exactly who, what, and how. Methodically, he builds an understanding of how the situation progressed from the rise of Nazism — how the outcome of World War I affected anti-Semitism; Hitler’s election as Chancellor and the Nuremberg Laws; forced emigration, Kristallnacht and the German invasion of the countries of Europe; then ghettos, liquidations, concentration camps and death camps, which gives them context for any other knowledge they will gain over the years.

The foundation is an understanding of the historical facts, and both Holocaust scholar Mrs. Ruth Lichtenstein and Torah Umesorah have published history books and curricula to educate today’s kids, most prominently the Witness to History work published by Project Witness. But the history is only the beginning for chinuch purposes. The hashkafah, or Jewish thought element, is paramount.

To teach about the Holocaust is to open the door to building Jewish thought and Jewish identity in our youth, and Rabbi Klein goes so far as to say that, “Teaching the history without the hashkafah is almost not worth the effort.” The history is the groundwork, but the hashkafah is the objective.

Vital takeaways such as the eternity of our people, the nature of Amalek, and the downfall of humanism are incomparably more powerful through the lens of Holocaust education. “For example, the faultiness of vaunted German philosophies about morality — and the way that some Jews’ belief in German culture was their downfall — teach a powerful lesson about the place the secular world has in our lives, and that the Jewish spirit can only be nurtured by Toras Moshe,” says Rabbi Klein.

Currents

As the years pass, it’s typically harder for children to relate to the Holocaust. In the sunny, spacious, Jewish-American environs that cocoon kids in the illusion of a frum microworld, the dangers of Poland, Hungary, and Germany in the 1930s and 1940s are almost too remote to be relatable.

Decades ago, every older man in shul could roll up his sleeve to reveal an inked number, but not many survivors walk among us today. Most children of 2025 have never seen that chilling tattoo. Nor are they children or grandchildren of Holocaust survivors — although they might be great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren. In most cases, we can assume zero personal connection with anyone who endured the war years.

This reality means teachers have to work to bring the European churban to life. “When you do break through the emotional barriers, you get a reaction. The teaching is easier with girls, and harder with boys, simply because the emotional hardware is different. But it can be done. I have taught Mesivta boys a poem about the massacre of Kiev’s Jews in Babi Yar, translated into English and set to a symphony, and by the end of the period, half of them were crying. L’havdil, I also taught the poem at a community event in St. Louis, where there were non-Jewish participants in the audience with no personal connection, and they also broke down,” says Rabbi Klein.

The key, then, is the emotion. Today’s generation has a tougher exterior. Holocaust studies cannot be taught like geography or math — the teacher has to be trained to speak to the students’ hearts, and the mode of presentation has to be strategic. For some schools, this means running an intense program for a few weeks instead of a weekly class over the year that can’t offer the same emotional journey. Guest speakers, slide presentations, videos, survivor interviews, personal stories, and songs, are all useful aids. Children of survivors are often invited to schools, telling their parents’ stories in place of the previous generation.

Mrs. Lobell has her students do a report where they draw on family history to explore a specific object. This year, she asked another teacher to present, too, and show the class her mother’s yellow star. “To these children, the Holocaust is history. When there’s a piece of it that’s tangible to them, something that they can hold on to, it brings the Holocaust to the present.”

Some schools successfully use student-led projects and exhibitions as a tool, encouraging students to zoom in on one Holocaust victim story and present that as an exhibit for parents. In England and Europe, the program is often capped by a powerful visit to sites in Poland or Hungary, forging an emotional connection with the events and lessons of the Holocaust.

Since the outbreak of Hamas violence, Rabbi Roodyn says, mindsets have changed. Suffering and injustice and atrocities have once again become household ideas. In response, he has developed a curriculum on Sinas Yisrael, finding the common thread between Jewish suffering through history, all the way back to Nimrod and Eisav. “Learning about hatred through the ages helps kids to process current events in context. At the same time, less-affiliated Jews have experienced a wake-up call to Sinas Yisrael, and to what it means for us.”

“If you look into Shiri Bibas’s eyes as she is captured with her children, you are viewing an image of the Holocaust,” he continues. “The sheer fear and terror is what we saw on the faces of the Nazis’ victims. We’ve gotten a chilling reminder that the story is still unfolding, and that all those who proclaimed ‘Never Again’ were so utterly wrong.”

On Site

Rabbi Roodyn has been taking frum teenagers — from chareidi to Modern Orthodox — to Europe since 2008, and while the messages are the same, he says that his colleagues have changed what they say and how they say it.

Today’s kids have a shorter attention span. They need fewer facts and figures, more stories. “In 2008, the tour was like a nonstop shiur for three days. The kids did not stop asking hashkafic and intellectual questions — any Holocaust teacher must create a safe space for hashkafic questions. But today, there is less intense questioning. Kids are still intelligent, but less intense, and they best absorb shorter soundbites.”

The boys talk less than girls do as they see the cattle cars, ruined shuls, and memorial stones, but it’s all internalized, Rabbi Roodyn believes. As they daven at kevarim in Cracow, Lodz, and Warsaw, and visit the yeshivah of Chachmei Lublin, the gedolim and rabbanim he mentions are much more real to the boys. Since they learn Mishnayos with the Tosfos Yom Tov and discuss the psakim of gedolim such as the Rema, Maharshal, the Bach, the Shach, and the Taz, these aren’t just names to them, but real people whose teachings they encounter in their daily lives.

The rabbis’ and educators’ job is to keep the tours age- and stage-appropriate. Depending on the composition of the group, they will decide how much to share at each stage of the journey.

There can be surprises, though. Once, when Rabbi Roodyn accompanied a group of high-school girls and their teachers on a tour of Holocaust-related sites, he was surprised by the wailing, screaming, and crying. “They were fifteen or sixteen, which was young for this trip, but since some high schools finish at that age [after 11th grade, after which boys go to yeshivah and girls to seminary], the schools wanted to offer it then. We took them to a very dark place, and although we were gentle and didn’t overdo anything, the girls lost themselves. The next night, though, we went to daven at the kever of Reb Elimelech in Lizhensk, and they had the same reaction. So obviously it wasn’t just about the place we went to, it was an emotional group who were triggered — and triggered each other, even in a makom tefillah.”

Rabbi Roodyn sums it up. “Teaching about the Nazi Holocaust is a chiyuv of remembering what Amalek did to us. And with understanding comes a revelation. Why did the Nazis go to such lengths? What is so special about every Jewish child that they were compelled to rid the world of them all?”

If we can internalize that message, we emerge stronger and victorious. Rabbi Roodyn sees students come back from Poland uplifted with renewed vigor and pride in their Yiddishkeit. “Learning about the Holocaust properly, especially on a powerful educational trip, can take years to filter into a young person’s consciousness, but it is a long-term investment that most certainly shapes lives.”

Yoni’s Adventures on October the 7th

Ricky Boles

Working in the frum publishing world, we often get pitched manuscripts from aspiring writers hoping to serialize their work in a magazine before releasing it as a full-length book. Recently, I came across one such pitch:

A comic series about a boy named Yoni. The story opens on Simchas Torah morning. Yoni is still asleep when Hamas terrorists infiltrate his kibbutz. In a heart-pounding sequence of panels, he hatches a daring plan to rescue his baby sister before he’s taken hostage to Gaza. Through a mix of brilliance, bravery, and sheer mazel, Yoni escapes his captors, saves other children from the tunnels along the way, and returns to Eretz Yisrael as a hero.

Of course no such comic exists.

That would be outrageous.

And yet, in the car on my way to Brooklyn last week, I found myself sitting through a different outrageous tale — one that is in circulation, is widely consumed, and is proudly marketed as frum entertainment.

This story was about a clever boy outwitting KGB agents with a series of tricks and deceptions. My kids were cackling at the slapstick dialogue and exaggerated villains, while I sat there thinking: What would those who lived through this say? So many Yidden spent years, terrified, under Communist rule. Would they smile as they listened to this story? Or would they marvel at how far removed we are from the actual fear, brutality, and helplessness that defined those years?

On a hunch, I started flipping through some of the comic books on our shelves, many of them depicting the Holocaust: Nazis portrayed as bumbling fools, drunk and dim-witted. Children surviving with little more than street smarts and some courage.

I remembered how once, when I was talking to some kids about what children their age went through in the ghetto, one kid asked, “Well, why couldn’t they just run away?” He’d heard that happen with great success in one of his favorite stories.

What an irresponsible way to teach kids about one of the greatest tragedies to befall our people.

A story like Yoni’s Adventures on October the 7th wouldn’t make it past the editor’s desk. It’s too soon. Too real. Too sacred. But does it only take a few decades for Communist Russia and even the Holocaust to lose their sacred status and become the stuff of entertainment — complete with punch lines, action-packed exploits, and heroic 12-year-olds besting evil?

This is more than an educational issue. It’s an ethical one.

The storytellers, the publishers, the creative directors are shaping our children’s historical knowledge — and in some cases, they’re distorting it. When we hand our kids a beautifully illustrated comic book, or CDs with suspenseful music, and illiterate-sounding Nazis, we rob them of the truth.

We blunt their sense of empathy. And we risk raising a generation that confuses gezeiros Shamayim with entertainment.

We owe our children, and our grandparents, more than that.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 954)