TEACH IN – International Holocaust Remembrance Day

A CWB Community Wide TEACH INWe invite all Holocaust Educators to participate on January 27, 2022 to celebrate Jewish spiritual resistance during Nazi occupation. Just RSVP to receive lesson plans, resources and a link to screen the film, “Who Will Write Our History” by Roberta Grossman!

“What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground…” so wrote Dawid Graber, aged 19, from within the Warsaw Ghetto. Graber’s words meet visitors today to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. The new permanent exhibit at JHI documents and remembers Emanuel Ringelblum and Oyneg Shabes – their work in creating the Warsaw Ghetto archive. The Ringelblum (Ghetto) archive was a weapon against Nazi oppression, a way for the Jews of Warsaw to resist – to write their own history. Ringelblum and Oyneg Shabes goal was to explain to future historians and humanity what life was like in the Warsaw Ghetto from the Jewish perspective. Clandestinely complied from 1940 until the destruction of the ghetto after the Ghetto uprising in 1943, the Archive contains testimonies from Warsaw Jews, it provides a documentary record of the fate of the Warsaw Jewry. Ten metal boxes and steel milk canisters held the archive when it was buried between those years. The first tranche was found on 18 September 1946, the final pieces four years later.

Utilizing the history and stories contained within the Oyneg Shabes archive, Classrooms Without Borders will host a virtual ‘teach in;’ we invite schools and school districts, teachers and students to engage in the study of Emanuel Ringelblum and Oyneg Shabes on the same day, Thursday January 27, 2022, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Around Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Ohio, Florida, and across the United States, including schools in Israel and Poland, teachers and students will all learn about this act of spiritual resistance from within the Warsaw Ghetto.

*A virtual tour and teacher workshop on the Ringelblum archive and Oyneg Shabes was held before the TEACH IN for participating educators.