Blog

Professional Development: Navigating the New Curriculum

With the rollout of the new Grade 6 curriculum’s inclusion of Holocaust education, school boards and teachers across Ontario have been searching for guidance from local organizations to help them navigate the complex subject matter.

Reflections on Teaching the Holocaust

In this blog post, the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program manager of education initiatives, Marc-Olivier Cloutier, asks Stephanie Kessler, an English and history teacher at Collège Reine-Marie in Montreal, about her experiences teaching the Holocaust. Kessler brings Holocaust education into the curriculum year after year, using many of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program resources.

Listener-Witness: My Role as a Writing Partner for the Sustaining Memories Project

“No one / bears witness for the / witness,” writes Paul Celan in “Ashglory” (here translated by Pierre Joris). I returned to this poem again and again when, in 2017, I held the role of writing partner for the Sustaining Memories Project, a program created by the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program in partnership with the G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University).

Seeing History: A Reflection on In the Hour of Fate and Danger by Ferenc Andai

As the child of a Holocaust survivor, John Lorinc has tried to research a wartime experience his father couldn’t share.

A Woman's Shoes

A story about shoes: It was Holocaust Education Week, 2019, and I accompanied Judy Cohen, the 91-year-old survivor whose memoir I was then immersed in — shifting passages, recasting sentences, checking dates and historical data — to a talk she was giving at York University.

How Teachers Teach the Holocaust: Survey Findings

Since its inception, the Azrieli Foundation's Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program has made education a central part of its mission.

Kol Nidre in Auschwitz

In her memoir, A Cry in Unison, Holocaust survivor, educator and human rights activist Judy Weissenberg Cohen​​ tells the story of how she and her “camp sisters” in Auschwitz-Birkenau observed Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.