In the midst of rising antisemitism, an increase in disinformation and Missouri’s new laws mandating Holocaust education, the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education (MCHE) holds an opportunity for local and rural educators to further learn about the Holocaust in order to better teach their students.
The course, called KC to DC, is centered around a trip to Washington, D.C. and experiences at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). This year’s cohort consisted of 17 teachers from Missouri and Kansas.
KC to DC is sponsored by Sam Devinki, a Kansas Citian and son of Holocaust survivors, who is passionate about Holocaust education. He serves on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and received the Wings of Memory Leadership Award for the Midwest Region by the USHMM. His support subsidized the learning experience; MCHE Director of Education Dr. Shelly Cline, who traveled with the KC to DC group, said the organization is grateful for Devinki’s support.
The 2023 cohort of educators is the third group to participate in KC to DC. This year’s teachers came from schools in Andover, Arma, Easton, Prairie Village and Kansas City, Kansas; and Centerville, House Springs, Monett, Noel, Rich Hill, Smithton, Sullivan and Kansas City, Missouri. The educators participated in sessions both before and after the trip to Washington, which took place from July 17 to 19.
“Supporting classroom educators has always been a top priority for MCHE,” said Jessica Rockhold, executive director of MCHE. “This program allows us to provide intensive education and resources before and after the travel experience, taps into important resources available through USHMM and provides a bonding experience for the educators involved. In addition to being able to come back to the MCHE team, they become a professional support network for each other as they translate this learning into their classrooms.”
The KC to DC participants come away with a stronger grasp on the history and impact of the Holocaust, and feel better equipped for teaching the topic to their students.
“This experience has given me a better general knowledge to field student questions [about the Holocaust],” said Nicole Myers, a teacher at Valley Middle School in House Springs, Missouri.
The culmination of the program will be the teachers’ lesson plans for Holocaust education at their schools in the next school year. These plans will be developed and presented to the MCHE in the fall.
During a post-trip session at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City, the teachers gathered in-person and over Zoom to share their thoughts on the trip and share potential lesson plan ideas with each other and MCHE staff. Devinki also shared the story of his mother (which is available on the MCHE website) and answered teachers’ questions.
A point that many of the educators intend to include in their lessons is the value of personal stories. The figure of six million murdered Jews is overwhelming and hard to conceptualize; the teachers believe that emphasizing individuals and their experiences will help students understand the magnitude and horrors of the Holocaust. They cited the USHMM’s “identification card” system, in which museum visitors receive ID cards with the stories of people who lived in Europe during the Holocaust. The cards, which are also available online, share the life stories and eventual fate of each person, allowing visitors to personalize and contextualize the historical events.
“Six million is a number, but it’s not until you see the faces and what [Jewish life] was before [the Holocaust],” said Jason Drinkard, a social studies teacher at Pleasant Ridge High School in Easton, Kansas. “I doubt [students] have seen the faces.”
Emilee Sumler, an elementary and junior high school art teacher at Noel Primary School in Noel, Missouri, aims to help students understand the individual stories of the Holocaust by showing artwork made in Theresienstadt. Theresienstadt was a ghetto-labor camp used as propaganda by the Nazis — the Germans “beautified” the camp to trick the International Red Cross into believing that the Nazis were treating Jews well.
According to the USHMM, many Czechoslovakian, Austrian and German Jewish artists were forced into the camp. The artists, along with some of the 15,000 children who passed through the camp, created artwork and poetry, “some of them clandestine depictions of the ghetto's harsh reality.”
“Americans and the Holocaust,” a temporary exhibition at the USHMM, also gave teachers ideas for education opportunities. The exhibition highlights the American responses to Nazism and the Holocaust; KC to DC participants were struck by the apathy of Americans.
Another KC to DC cohort is planned for 2025.
Educators are not the only group who travel with the MCHE to Washington. Devinki (along with Dr. Joseph Tauber) also began the Together We Remember program with MCHE in 2007. Together We Remember takes Jewish high school students from the Kansas City area to see the USHMM.
More information about the MCHE is available at mchekc.org, along with student and teacher resources for Holocaust education.