Itongadol.- As children across Israel returned to school on Tuesday, the Shem Olam Institute released documents providing a rare glimpse into the education system of Jewish children living in ghettos during the Holocaust. Among the documents found by researchers from Shem Olam – the Faith and Holocaust Institute for Education and Research- is a letter sent on January 29, 1941, by heads of the Jewish community in Krakow, Poland to the Jewish Council in Lublin.
While many other Holocaust commemoration organizations focus on the tragedy that Europe\’s Jews underwent, Shem Olam explores how people coped in their situations. "Morality, spirituality, religious life, humanity and moral issues," are the focus of the center\’s work, head of the institute, Rabbi Abraham Krieger, tells The Jerusalem Post.
Among the documents was the curriculum of schools in the Krakow Ghetto, which Krieger says is the first itinerary of this kind to be found. Though the curriculum was specifically for Krakow, the documents also give us an idea about what was happening in other ghettos, as the letter set out to explain to Jewish community leaders in the Lublin ghetto about how they can tackle the issue of education. "Because Krakow was known as more organized and Lublin was smaller and less organized to start with," Krieger explains.
The authors of the letter expressed concern that the upcoming school year would not open, and suggested that due to "non-uniform desires of the parents" they opened three different types of schools to meet the needs of three different types of communities: religious, secular and Zionist. The amount of hours dedicated to Jewish studies varied from school to school, ranging from 10 to 18 hours a week.
Alongside Jewish studies, Polish Jews were required to study general subjects, such as arithmetic, geography, nature and the Polish language.
"Because this is the beginning of the school year, we thought it was important for students today to hear how much effort people put into building schools during the Holocaust," Krieger says, expressing hope that it might help motivate youth of today and highlight the importance of education.
"The documents that we have, reveal on the one hand, the deep concerns the Jewish community had that the school year would not open — despite the existential threat that accompanied them in that dark time — and on the other hand, their desire to preserve Jewish studies at the center of the education system, seemingly in order to strengthen Jewish identity and heritage in a time of emergency that threatened extinction," he adds.