Pre–World War II European Jewish Life Photo Project
Lesson (printable) PDF version »
Student Instructions PDF version »
Aimee Young, Loudonville-Perrysville Exempted Village Schools’ High School, Loudonville, Ohio
GOALS FOR STUDENT UNDERSTANDING
- Students will develop an understanding of pre–World War II Jewish religious, cultural, and communal life in Europe in order to distinguish individual lives from the statistics of the Holocaust.
- Students will develop an understanding of the importance of recognizing and appreciating differences, whether individual, cultural, religious, or otherwise.
WHAT STUDENTS WILL DO TO BUILD THEIR UNDERSTANDING
- Students will locate and examine pre–World War II Jewish religious, cultural, and communal life in Europe through photographs from that time.
- Students will interpret what some aspects of pre–World War II Jewish life in Europe may have been like and relate that to their own lives.
- Students will research information about the locales of photographs collected to discover different aspects of Jewish life before and after Nazi occupation.
- Students will analyze photographs collected and the research gathered on different Jewish communities.
- Students will evaluate Jewish life in Europe before World War II and describe it in a follow-up writing assignment.
- Students will synthesize the goals of the project through class discussion at the end of the lesson to process the individuality of Jewish lives lost in the Holocaust.
STATE STANDARDS
- This project connects to several of Ohio’s state standards for English/Language Arts including:
- Reading Process standards, comprehension strategies
- Writing Process standards, prewriting, drafting, and revising
- Writing Applications and Conventions standards, writing responses and producing informal writings
- Research standards, appropriate and accurate sources, and the gathering/evaluation of information
- Communications standards, active listening, interpretation, evaluation and delivery strategies
