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
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
RESOURCES AND HANDOUTS: BACKGROUND MATERIALS
- The Holocaust: Prejudice Unleashed, the Ohio State Department of Education’s curriculum guide, by the Ohio Council on Holocaust Education. This is a 10-lesson curriculum that includes materials, student activities, and resources, as well as supplementary guides for teaching any length unit on the Holocaust. The guide includes lessons concerning the foundations of the Holocaust, the culture of the Jews, the steps to the “Final Solution,” responses to the Holocaust, and the meaning of the Holocaust in today’s world.
- There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok, by Yaffa Eliach. Eliach, one of only 29 survivors of Eishyshok, documents life in a shtetl before the Nazis invaded. Because this book is rich in photographs and information of one Jewish community’s history, as well as its bitter end, it’s a valuable reference to guide students’ understanding in the parallels of Jewish communal life then to their own lives now.
- Historical Atlas of the Holocaust, by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This geographical atlas and historical text covers all aspects of the Holocaust, including what happened in different areas of Europe, the Nazi killing centers, Jewish resistance, and postwar Europe. For this particular lesson, the first section on Europe before the war is important, as well as other more specific maps that students may use to locate Jewish communities in Europe for research.
- “Survivors of the Holocaust,” video by Steven Spielberg and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. A historic documentary chronicled in timeline form through survivors’ own testimonies, this video is profoundly useful in giving students an eyewitness account of Jewish life before the Nazis and how drastically it changed. The hour-long video is the introduction for my course on the Holocaust, and students remember the survivors’ stories of their lives through the entire 12-week class.
