Catholic school teachers recently spent several days learning about Catholic-Jewish relations and how to teach about the Holocaust.
Bearing Witness is a national program of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and is endorsed by the National Catholic Education Association and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum also provides training and offers the use of historical photographs and maps.
In Los Angeles, Bearing Witness is presented by the ADL in conjunction with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the Department of Catholic Schools.
This year was the fifth annual Bearing Witness Institute in Southern California training nearly three dozen teachers in how to help their students understand the horrors of the Holocaust, reject anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, and to further Catholic-Jewish relations.
Among the speakers presenting at Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel in Westwood, was Dr. Michael Berenbaum, a theology professor of Jewish Studies at American Jewish University in Bel-Air and a former adjunct professor of theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
The Holocaust - a watershed event in history with its systematic state-sponsored genocide of six million Jews and six million other people -- was the "epitome of evil," said Berenbaum. Tragically, given the recurrence of genocide in places like Darfur, teaching "the Holocaust is more relevant today than 30 years ago," he said.
"We can't teach the Holocaust to teach that the world is an evil place," said Berenbaum. "We have to teach students empowerment."
This means giving more weight to the rescue stories - those rare times when Christians risked their own lives to hide and save a Jewish person.
"The good doers," he said, were "ordinary people doing ordinary things under extraordinary circumstances."
Students, added Berenbaum, can relate and resonate with the idea of taking a stand for ordinary decency.
High school teacher Jennifer Norton instructed teachers on ways to teach about the Holocaust. Teaching the Holocaust, said Norton, is a way to teach religious tolerance, people's personal involvement with history, the dangers of remaining silent, and the uses and abuses of power. There are many primary resources teachers can use like letters, diaries, and photographs to humanize the dehumanizing statistics and show the interrelationships between the victims, Nazi perpetrators, bystanders and rescuers, she said.
Several Catholic presenters during the three-day program included Nancy Coonis, archdiocesan superintendent of Secondary Schools; Father Alexei Smith, archdiocesan Ecumenical and Interreligious officer; and Father Dennis D. McManus, staff consultant to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on Catholic-Jewish relations.
Lucy Fahrbach, a sophomore religion teacher at Bishop Garcia Diego Catholic High School in Santa Barbara, said she thought of anti-Judaism as "more of an attitude of thinking I don't need to know about the Jewish religion because I have Jesus now."
On her own time Fahrbach enjoys learning about prophets in the Old Testament/Hebrew Scriptures. She was delighted when the Bearing Witness program included listening to a rabbi and a priest give commentary on a Gospel reading.
"Both shed more light on the Gospel passage," said Fahrbach. When the priest asked the rabbi a question about Jesus' techniques as a Jewish teacher and rabbi, "it was very enlightening."
"The trend now is to be more collaborative and to understand that Jewish history is our history," she said. "We have the same God."
Fifth grade religion teacher Yvonne Dela Cruz and social studies teacher Diana Planes of Our Lady of the Assumption School in Claremont, said that Bearing Witness taught them to emphasize the important connections between the Old and the New Testaments as well as the close relationship between Judaism and Christianity.
The "same bottom line," said Dela Cruz, "is having respect for human dignity."
Editor's note: To add your name to an "interest list" for the next Bearing Witness Institute, contact Matthew Friedman at mfriedman@adl.org.
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