Daycare teacher pins ‘Jude’ stars on 3-year-olds

A daycare teacher was suspended from her position and is to be summoned for a hearing after the three-year-old children under her care arrived home on Wednesday afternoon with yellow stars pinned to their shirts, in commemoration of Thursday’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.

One mother wrote on Facebook that she was “appalled, in total shock, having a hard time expressing and refusing to believe the direction in which the education of our children is going.” She posted a photo of her daughter wearing the paper yellow “Jude” star, and wrote: “This is how my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter came home today from daycare.”

The mother berated the daycare center for its insensitivity, and noted that the yellow star confused the children, who viewed it as a prize.

“In the world of a child, when you give him a sticker or a symbol, it is interpreted as a prize or something indicating they behaved well, a far, far cry from the meaning of this symbol, with its heavy baggage — too heavy for toddlers,” she said. The message, “could be conveyed in a moderate, correct way for the ages in question,” she said.

What if one of the kids’ grandparents, a Holocaust survivor, had come to pick them up? she asked.

The Education Ministry said in response that the teacher had been suspended, and would be summoned to a hearing. It said that it was treating the case seriously, according to Channel 2.

The Rishon Lezion municipality said that all teachers had been given explicit instructions on how to broach the topic with the toddlers, and the teacher in question had violated the directive.

This year marks the first year that Holocaust studies were taught in preschools, as part of a new program by the Education Ministry. According to the plan, children in daycare are taught the subject ahead of the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day. The rationale behind the decision, the ministry explained last year, is that children become aware of information about the Holocaust on that date, through the memorial siren, TV and radio, but lack a coherent framework to make sense of it. Their teachers must broadly inform the children about the events while maintaining their sense of safety, it said.

Daycare educators were told to refrain from showing any images or describing the atrocities in ways that are liable to frighten the children, to stress that the events occurred far away and a long time ago, and to emphasize the heroism of Jews and non-Jews during that period.