Student-Organized Holocaust Education Symposium Teaches How to Keep Survivors’ Stories Alive Featuring speakers who ranged in expertise from renowned psychologist David Pelcovitz, The Gwendolyn and Joseph Straus Professor of Psychology and Jewish Education at Azrieli to Yeshiva University Museum artist-in-residence Sebastian Mendes, YU’s Student Holocaust Education Movement (SHEM) brought scholars, survivors and students together for a spring symposium on the Wilf Campus. The event explored themes in Holocaust documentation and memory, guiding audience members through the process of preserving survivor stories in their own lives. Workshops and topic discussions included the psychology of victimhood, translating historical accounts into creative expression and how to elicit stories from survivors with sensitivity. “Our students see their past, present and future as intertwined,” said Karen Bacon, The Monique C. Katz Dean of Stern College for Women. “As Jews, they have a sense of history and destiny. We all feel an obligation to elicit, document and immortalize these stories.” According to Mindy Sojcher, a Jewish education major at Stern College and vice president of SHEM, providing participants with skills that would enable them to preserve Holocaust memories in their own right was a major focus of the symposium. “My grandparents are Holocaust survivors and I wanted to know for myself how to approach them, how to interview them,” said Sojcher. “We really emphasized the ‘how-to’ element of this event. We wanted people to walk away from these sessions with tools that will help them approach their grandparents, neighbors or other survivors and ask questions about their stories.”

Peninnah Schram, associate professor of speech and drama at Stern College, delivered a talk titled, “Stories of the Holocaust,” and suggested asking survivors to share the parables, proverbs and folklore of their childhood as a means of preserving the culture and heritage destroyed in the Holocaust. She also emphasized the roles personal testimony and folktales have played in the survival of Jewish experience throughout history. “Jews are a people who remember,” she said. “It is through our narratives and our creative imaginations that we most effectively transmit our history, faith, traditions and values.” That idea resonated with Jesse Shore, a Yeshiva College senior majoring in philosophy with a focus in religion. “We’re the last generation that will have direct contact with survivors,” he said. “I think that as a Jew, you have as much of an obligation to incorporate the stories of the Holocaust into your identity as you do those of the exodus from Egypt.”

For Mitzi Steiner, an American studies and human rights major at Barnard College, the symposium’s focus on the future was important. “Tonight is more than a memorial,” she said. “It’s a night of active thinking and guidance about the best way to transmit these stories and memories into the future. We’re reaching a point where commemoration isn’t enough.” Closing speaker Steffa Hassan framed the educational night with testimony from her own experience as a Holocaust survivor, a vivid reminder of the reason memory preservation is a critical focus in the Holocaust education movement. “What happened before is not a gone item,” she said. “By preserving the memory and traditions they tried to demolish, you are fighting yesterday’s Nazis today.”