Reflections on My Commitment to Holocaust Education

September 11th this year was the 110th anniversary of my maternal grandmother Fannie – Faige – Dumes at the age of 14 arriving at Ellis Island from Latvia (this photo of Fannie is from 1935). As I’m named for Fannie, I never met her, although I’ve recently been thinking about her.

This is partly because the Dumes family is having a Zoom reunion on October 18 as a temporary solution to canceling the scheduled in-person reunion. As part of the Zoom reunion, each of the seven branches of the children of Fannie’s parents has to provide a 10-minute video. I’m the coordinator for Fannie’s branch, so I’ve been digging into the family documents in my possession.

As immigrants my grandmother and her husband Max Fishman (from Tiraspol, Ukraine), who together ran a junkyard in Princeton, Indiana, did not have a rose garden. But then they weren’t murdered by the Nazis as were some of the Dumes relatives still in Latvia.

It is partly out of gratitude that my ancestors had the courage and wisdom to “get out of Dodge” that I am so committed to Holocaust education for middle school and high school students. I want young people to know the history of how unaddressed small acts of anti-Semitism and hate grew into larger and larger acts until it was too late to stop the Final Solution.

Understanding this history can help young people today develop the courage and wisdom to stand up for what is right. No, they don’t have to be Oskar Schindler or Martin Luther King Jr. Yet they can find ways, for example, to stand up to bullies in school or insist that a minority viewpoint in class not be disparaged. In other words, we can help make a rose garden here in the U.S.

THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE* free nonfiction theater project

To this end I co-founded the free nonfiction theater project ThinEdgeOfTheWedge.com to combat anti-Semitism and hate. The project is centered on firsthand survivor and savior testimonies I published as the editor of the monthly literary supplement of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent in the 1970s.

The accompanying project resource material includes questions that young people can consider today:

A. When you see the graffiti of a Nazi swastika, do you know what this symbol represents? How do you think it makes people feel who have been subjected to anti-Semitism and hate? What does displaying this symbol say about our classroom, our school and our society as a whole?

B. Do you read/hear the news of anti-Semitic and racist acts against people and property and only think “That’s too bad” without doing anything against these acts?

C. Do you think — if the attacks are not against your ethnicity or gender identification — that you are safe?

D. Do you think that one person cannot make a difference? Can you think of an example from your own life where one person made a difference?

During this time when many young people are studying remotely, it could be a good opportunity to check out the THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE resources including the reading list at www.millermosaicllc.com/holocaust-reading-list/ And it is also a good opportunity for young people to help make a rose garden in the U.S. – promoting understanding of others and equal rights for all.

*Definition of “thin edge of the wedge”: A minor harmful change that starts a chain of more and more changes resulting in dangerous consequences.