Teaching the Holocaust
Commemoration in the Classroom: Introduction

Forest Ridge Students - classroom museumTeaching materials for Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day 

 

Holocaust Remembrance Day - Yom Hashoah (yom ha-shō'ah) in Hebrew, occurs on the 27th day of Nisan, in the Hebrew calendar. Ceremonies take place on this day every year in remembrance of the approximately six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. It is a national holiday in Israel.

This year Yom Hashoah is on Thursday, April 19, 2012. 

The Holocaust Center's annual Holocaust Remembrance Day Community Program will be held on Sunday, April 22, 2012 on Mercer Island.  More details to come, or please email info@wsherc.org.


What was the Holocaust?

The Holocaust refers to a specific event during the 20th century. It was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and destruction of European Jewish people by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945. While Jews were the primary target of Nazi hatred, the Nazis also persecuted and murdered Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), homosexuals, Poles, Jehovah's Witnesses, and people with disabilities. Six million Jews (two-thirds of the European Jewish population) and five million others were murdered in the Holocaust


What does the word Holocaust mean?

The term Holocaust originally meant a sacrifice that was totally burned by fire. The Hebrew word Shoah, which means "catastrophe" or "destruction," is also used to refer to the Holocaust.

What date is Holocaust Remembrance Day and why is not the same every year?

After the horrors of the Holocaust, Jews wanted a day to memorialize this tragedy. But what day? For two years, the date was debated. Finally, in 1950, compromises and bargaining began. The 27th of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar,* was chosen. This date falls beyond Passover but within the time span of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

On April 12, 1951, the Knesset (Israel's parliament) proclaimed Yom Hashoah U'Mered HaGetaot (Holocaust and Ghetto Revolt Remembrance Day) to be the 27th of Nisan. The name was later simplified to Yom Hashoah. This year Holocaust Remembrance Day falls on Thursday, April 19.

*The Hebrew calendar is based on the lunar cycle. The months are shorter than those on the solar calendar (the calendar we commonly use), so a date on the Hebrew calendar does not always match up with the same day on the solar calendar.

Isn't there also a Holocaust Remembrance Day in January?

To the thousands of survivors who were on the death march out of Auschwitz, and the many thousands who would not be liberated until the spring of 1945, January 27th is a controversial choice of dates.

Israel and the United States continue to make their primary observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day on the date assigned on the Hebrew calendar, the 27th of Nissan. (This year the date falls on April 19.)

Nonetheless, the UN's move is momentous as it urges Member States to develop educational programs to instill the memory of the tragedy in future generations to prevent genocide from occurring again...event genocide from occurring again...read UN document.