Nova Scotia teachers attend Holocaust workshop

HALIFAX — Naomi Azrieli excitedly opens a Holocaust education workshop. “This is the first workshop for educators we have done outside Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver,” she says proudly, welcoming 70 Halifax-area teachers to two sessions at the Nova Scotia Teachers Union building in Halifax. The program is part of Holocaust Education Week in Halifax, promoted by the Atlantic Jewish Council.

Azrieli is executive director and chair, as well as senior editor of books, for the Azrieli Foundation, founded in 1987 by her father, Holocaust survivor and developer David Azrieli. It promotes many programs, including the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs, a series of books written by survivors and geared to high school students. Teachers use the books to provide Holocaust
education programs.

In 1939, David Azrieli fled his native Poland at age 17, remaining a step ahead of the Nazis through Russia and Central Asia, and arriving in Palestine in 1942, where he studied at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.

In 1948, he joined the Israel Defence Forces and fought in Israel’s War of Independence. After the war, he lived in South Africa, England and the United States before settling in Canada in 1954. His two companies – Montreal based Canpro Investments Ltd. and the Tel Aviv-based Azrieli Group – are considered leaders in their fields. “My father wanted to help Canadian survivors publish
their memoirs so the stories wouldn’t be lost,” says Naomi Azrieli, who has a PhD in history from Oxford University and has taught at McMaster University and the University
of Toronto.

“He didn’t speak about his experiences for 30 years but, after re-visiting Poland and Russia in the late 1980s, decided to write his own story in 1990. It took him 10 years but Yad Vashem [in Jerusalem] was interested and published it immediately, something that was unusual, because most survivors never get their stories published.” David Azrieli wanted to help survivors living in Canada publish their stories. In 2007, after a call for submissions, Naomi and the foundation received many memoirs, “some only 10 pages, some as many as 800 pages, all with a unique perspective,” she says. In 2007, the first series of seven books was launched, followed by eight more books last January – many in English and French. All are free to teachers and students.

The foundation produced resource guides to enable teachers to guide their students to Holocaust understanding – its causes, events and results. Lisa Black-Meddings, a Toronto high school history teacher, consulted on developing the teaching guide. She conducted an afternoon session in Halifax, with 25 teachers attending. More than 45 were at her evening program. She shows the teachers how these Holocaust memoirs can be used in English, history, civics, social studies and
creative writing classes. She describes how the books can be used as memoirs, diaries, and even emotional backgrounds to the survivor’s new perspectives of life and death.

Leah Ann Cameron, a social studies teacher at Leslie Thomas Junior High in Sackville, N.S., has touched on the Holocaust with her Grade 8 and 9 students, usually over a one-month period. “This is a very detailed lesson plan, because a teacher helped prepare it,” she says. “I’ve been looking for ways to give the program the justice it deserves. These memoirs and the guide certainly will enable me to improve what I’ve been doing.” Cameron teaches in a French immersion school and states, “It’s good to see this available in French, too.” Monica Rojo, a Grade 7-12 Spanish and French teacher at Sacred Heart School in Halifax, attended Holocaust Education Week programs last year in Halifax and expressed enthusiasm about this year’s events.“I was excited to attend because our school devotes time to teach about tolerance. Today’s program will certainly better enable me to teach my students.”

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