(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)May 14, 2015

MAHWAH, N.J. – On May 13, 2015, The Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in association with The New Jersey State Commission on Holocaust Education hosted an all-day Echoes and Reflections workshop for local middle and high school teachers who want to incorporate Holocaust education into their teaching.

A joint program of the Anti-Defamation League, USC Shoah Foundation and Yad Vashem, Echoes and Reflections prepares teachers to teach the complex history of the Holocaust in a way that stimulates engagement, critical thinking and personal understanding by students. Through this comprehensive program, teachers help students gain relevant insight into how to examine human dilemmas and social challenges, and determine their roles and responsibilities in the world around them.

Attended by more than fifty educators from throughout northern New Jersey, the interactive workshop highlighted the liberation of survivors and their largely successful efforts to begin their shattered lives anew. Teachers learned how using documents, photographs, film and poetry as well as personal narratives make an amazing story of human resilience come alive in the classroom. Integral to the program is the Teacher’s Resource Guide that provides access to an extensive array of visual history testimonies, and unlimited use of supplementary multimedia resources and supportive tools from the expansive Echoes and Reflections website.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) presented the training at Ramapo, including the Teacher’s Resource Guide, free of charge. Acting as facilitator for the workshop was Elissa Zylbershlag, a seasoned educator with many years of experience with ADL.

Participants joined the more than 22,000 teachers from all fifty states who have participated in the program to date. Having successfully offered an Echoes and Reflections workshop, The Gross Center is now entitled to present Enhanced Learning Opportunities, a set of highly focused, interactive programs designed for previously trained educators. We plan to offer this advanced learning opportunity to qualified teachers in the near future.

At the conclusion of the training, participants had the unique opportunity to hear from Mrs. Sally Whitmore of Wayne, who actually experienced liberation and the return to life first hand. Sent as an eleven year-old to the Lodz ghetto and then surviving Auschwitz, she was eventually liberated at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp by British troops on April 14, 1945. Unfortunately, as she explained, her mother who was liberated with her, like many other newly free survivors, succumbed to Typhus shortly afterwards.

Still only a teenager and alone, she felt that she had no other choice but to start her life over. As much as possible, throughout her ordeal, she made it her business to maintain a positive attitude and persevere. Following the advice of her mother, her goal was to get to America. The first step, she recounted, was to leave the British for the American occupation zone of Germany, where conditions were much better for Displaced Persons. She realized her dream of finding a new home in the United States in 1949. While still in Germany, she trained as a nurse and met her future husband who also emigrated to America. Taken as a whole, what most characterized Sally Whitmore’s story of survival and rebirth was her ingenuity and positive attitude toward life.

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