Yad Vashem’s Int’l Holocaust Educators’ conference wrestles with new reality
150 educators from around the world arrive in Jerusalem for the biannual meet-up in an Israel reeling from the October 7 massacre – and a Jewish world facing renewed antisemitism
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
Yad Vashem’s biannual International Conference for Educators, taking place this week from July 1-4 in Jerusalem, has the timely theme “Holocaust Education in a Global Context.”
Following the October 7 Hamas onslaught on southern Israel, which saw some 1,200 murdered — most of them civilians — and 251 taken to Gaza as hostages, Diaspora Jewry reported sharply rising levels of antisemitism. As the war in Gaza unfolded, claims of “genocide” and other language associated with the Holocaust made headlines in media around the world.
This week’s conference is meant to “highlight the importance of Holocaust education and remembrance in our post-October 7th world,” Yad Vashem said in a Sunday statement.
“The fact is, antisemitism is currently challenging Holocaust education… The program has to reflect what is happening now in Israel and around the world,” explained Dr. Noa Mkayton, director of Yad Vashem’s Overseas Training Department, in a recent phone call with The Times of Israel.
Around 150 participants from some 40 countries, most of them working in Holocaust memorials, museums, or academia, have registered for the four-day conference. Most are experienced educators already working in the field, Mkayton said.
The conference is a chance to “exchange ideas, share best practices, and collaborate on strategies to combat antisemitism, Holocaust distortion, and historical inaccuracies,” the organization said in a statement.
“A person who today decides to engage or continue in Holocaust education, we can actually say that it’s a political statement. It’s not something to be taken for granted,” she said.
Especially in academia, “the post-colonial debate” has prepared the ground for “a kind of denying of the right, or the righteousness, of remembering and teaching the Holocaust as it is,” Mkayton said. “You have a very strong competition of this hierarchy of victimhood, comparing slavery and people of color and the Jews.”
“We are looking for educational ways to circumvent this zero-sum game, this competition… and to think about ways to find a way to respect all these national or human traumas, be it slavery or the Holocaust, and respect both without playing the one against the other,” Mkayton said.
Commitment to historical truth
Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan said in a statement that at a time when “antisemitism is exploding around the world, we are seeing more and more rampant Holocaust distortion and inversion in mainstream society.”
The educators’ conference, he said, represents “a message of commitment to the history and a signal to our educational leaders that Holocaust education is essential not only for knowledge and awareness about the history but is a vital tool in fostering a more tolerant and open society.”
For Mkayton, Yad Vashem as an organization is very strict in the view that “the Holocaust has to be examined and explored in its own context, and then we can explore universal ramifications,” she said.
Especially “after October 7, and all the things that happened in the ensuing war, we felt we have to unpack how to address Holocaust remembrance and education in a relevant way, without distortion,” she said.
Part of how this is done is by “being very precise in terminology” so that terms like genocide, the Holocaust, apartheid and other crimes do not all blend together as just “different events of mass killings.”
Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has been called a genocide by anti-Israeli protesters around the world, a use of the word Yad Vashem, and the Israeli government, has rejected.
“One thing we see, all these terms… There isn’t even an effort to be precise or to adhere to scientific standards anymore” among the general public, something Mkayton felt comes from people deriving their knowledge from social media, not from books.
Looking at events in context is the key, she stressed, to begin to understand these “rather complicated issues.” Those subscribing to “intersectionality” are often unwilling to examine difficult events in their particular context, which, in her view, leaves fertile ground for Holocaust denial and antisemitism, she added.
Educating a generation hooked on social media
One focus of the conference is on the new landscape of social media and how to engage with young people for whom this is their primary source of information.
“The new generation of teenagers these days is very different from 10 years ago… the attitude of high school students due to social media propaganda and peer pressure” is a big challenge, said English attendee James McMillan in a statement provided by Yad Vashem.
Another attendee, Stacy Saady from California, said, “After October 7, there has been a horrific rise in antisemitism, and those persecuting Jews in America try to say no, they are just anti-Zionist, with no understanding of what Zionism actually means and no knowledge of the geopolitical history of the region.”
Another topic is the challenge the current wave of antisemitism poses to traditional Holocaust education, but for Mkayton, the relationship between Holocaust education and antisemitism is a “complicated question.”
“Should they be taught together, or is it different?” she asked. “It’s not so obvious, and if you want to talk about antisemitism, it’s not enough to cover just the Nazi period.”
The brutal October 7 Hamas-led assault has been called the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust itself.
For Yad Vashem, the comparison stops there.
“We want to be clear, you don’t need to equate events with the Holocaust to add gravity. October 7 was such a grave catastrophe, you don’t need to put it on the scale of the Holocaust,” she said firmly.
“We are in such an earthquake,” Mkayton continued. “I expect to listen to each other, to hear what happens to these people in their professional and personal environment, to support each other and find common ground.”
“I don’t think we have to reinvent the wheel,” she said. “We have the context and our historical truth, and we want to stick to that.”
The Times of Israel Community.