During my last year of teaching in Israel, I prepared my own literature program about the Holocaust. Like other English teachers on staff, I was really insecure on how to approach teaching it and more particularly, I was afraid that it would reveal to me the true essence of being a Jew.
I chose Elie Wiesel’s powerful gripping account of his experience living at the extermination camps in Buchenwald and Buna in Night. Not too long ago, this book made headlines with Ophra’s Book club. I highly recommend reading this book. I thought the book was age appropriate for my twelfth graders. We read this book aloud, chapter by chapter, page by page. We reached the part when Elie’s father dies after months of survival. This was especially meaningful for them after they had returned from the Walk to Life in Poland and visited those same extermination camps. Even though I had never visited Poland, I felt I couldn’t continue reading. I urged him to continue. I told him that the experience was too emotional for me and could he please read?
His friend looked on. I stopped and asked questions which led to discussions about various topics. It was the tender yet bitter-sweet father-son relationship that I most identified with. Israel is still very much a traditional society as far as family relations are concerned and I knew that this part spoke to all of my students. My purpose was to make them think but also to feel.
Those lessons teaching the Holocaust taught me the essence of what it means to be a Jew. Now that I am far away from my kibbutz home in Pittsburgh living as a Jew in the diaspora, I am challenged to exact the relationship between my beliefs and Judaism. No matter the degree of our religious observance, we are all Jews, under the same sky.