TORONTO — Among the public schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day this week and next are Thornhill’s Yorkhill Elementary School and Ventura Park Public School – each with a different emphasis.
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Harriette Fleising, a junior and senior kindergarten teacher at Yorkhill Elementary School, feels an obligation to take on Holocaust education responsibilities at her school, although her own students are too young to take part in the programs she has organized.
About five years ago, Fleising organized her first school program for Holocaust Memorial Day. Since then, the program, for students in grades 4 to 8, has evolved and grown.
On May 6, about 350 students are scheduled to take part in a morning assembly that will be the culmination of 31/2 weeks of Holocaust study in conjunction with an in-class “adopt a survivor” program that Fleising instituted last year.
Each participating class has “adopted” one of three Holocaust survivors: 98-year-old Polish Catholic rescuer Irena Sendler, who saved 2,500 Jewish children; Toronto resident Benny Turk, a Partisan child survivor who will attend the assembly; and the Stermer family, who were among 38 people to survive the war by spending a total of more than a year in two underground caves consecutively.
“[The Stermers’] courage and their fortitude and their ingenuity and their creativity were beyond anything you can imagine,” said Fleising, a daughter of survivors whose octogenarian mother and mother-in-law were among those taking part in last year’s assembly.
At least one member of the Stermer family will be at this year’s event. In the afternoon, the adopted survivors or their representatives will speak to individual classes. Assembly speakers include Ted Chudleigh, the Progressive Conservative MPP who sponsored the legislation that resulted in Ontario’s Holocaust Memorial Day, and Frank Dimant, vice-president of B’nai Brith Canada.
Based on past years, Fleising said the children “get so much out of this.”
She said she is motivated by a desire to raise awareness of the Holocaust. “I want to make [students] sensitive about good and evil. I want them to be able to say, when the deniers are saying it never happened, ‘I was part of the project. I spoke to a survivor. It did happen.’
“In light of what’s happening in the world today, maybe to prevent [another Holocaust], stand up for what’s right, make the world a better place, keep these stories alive.”
“In a way, it’s my duty, even though I do not officially teach those grades.”
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Seven Ventura Park Public School students, wearing “Together We’re Better” T-shirts, planned this week’s student conference on Antiracism and Ethnocultural Equity. In front, from left, are Ben Kideckel and Josh Valentini. Standing, from left, are Daniel Schiffer, Justin Rain, Gaby Gerson, Melissa Siu-Chong and Hila Berger.
At nearby Ventura Park Public School, about four kilometres away, grades 7 and 8 classes – about 200 students in total – have been gearing up to participate in a “Student Conference on Antiracism and Ethnocultural Equity” that was to take place on Tuesday of this week.
The conference is not a Holocaust memorial event per se, but Lilian Tolensky, the teacher-librarian overseeing the program, said that Holocaust-related material would be included as part of the presentation.
She noted that Ventura Park students, most of whom are Jewish and some of whom are from survivor families, are “very familiar” with the Holocaust, but “don’t know what’s going on in Rwanda or Darfur.”
Holocaust education is not part of the school’s formal curriculum, she said, but it has been incorporated in the past by having lots of guest speakers and related activities.
This year’s half-day event grew out of a York Region District School Board conference on anti-racism and ethnocultural equity, in January, called “Together We’re Better.”
Tolensky, who attended that conference with seven grades 7 and 8 students chosen in part for their good citizenship, said that their mandate after the conference was “to make the student population aware of the issues and the possible solutions.” The group decided to plan its own school conference.
Tolensky said the students left the January conference with an increased awareness of how much they have and a desire to make a difference in the community. “These kids were very committed to making sure their peers knew there was a world outside of Thornhill.”
The conference will feature keynote speakers Progressive Conservative MPP for Thornhill Peter Shurman, who will talk about eliminating racism, and Avrum Rosenzweig of Ve’ahavta: The Canadian Jewish Humanitarian and Relief Committee. Other speakers include law student Yoni Levitan, executive director of STAND Canada, a Darfur advocacy and awareness group.
Also, Melanie Simons, national social policy co-ordinator of Canadian Jewish Congress, will present material from the Choose Your Voice anti-racism education program, which is sponsored by FAST (Fighting Antisemitism Together). An estimated 400,000-plus students in Canada have been exposed to the program.
