Yonathan Bar-On's Class and School Projects

 Five Holocaust survivors, born in five different countries, shared five very different life stories. Students turned those stories into five videos. The  title of the project was taken from a poem by one of the five survivors, the writer and poet Halina Birenbaum.

 20 schools, choirs, orchestras and 2 rabbis from 8 different countries and 4 different continents, sang, played and then shared Christmas and/or Hanukkah songs, plus their best wishes for the new year. This project was done in 2021, 2022 and 2024 .

I created three Nearpod units, using three Centropa stories ( Erna Goldmann : From Frankfurt to Tel Aviv; Herbert Lewin : Stories of My Life; and Zachor - Remember ). Students from different countries can work in small groups, online, independently. The big advantage of this is that there is no need for frontal, full-class online meetings. Such meetings can be a huge technical challenge. Of all the Centropa projects, this is the only one that I have not had the chance yet to use with my students.

During the war in former Yugoslavia, the Jewish community of Sarajevo became a center where Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Jews and others worked together to survive and to help one another. Using Centropa videos ( El Otro Camino: 1492 and Survival in Sarajevo ), I teach my students about the story of the Jews of Sarajevo and of their charitable organisation La Benevolencia. Using this as a historical background, I start a discussion about minorities and majorities and about human rights, and how those rights protect and benefit all of us, no matter where we are and no matter whether we (Jews and others) are in the minority or the majority. I point out the 'Jewish connection' to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (after WWII and the Holocaust, with Rene Cassin, the French-Jewish lawyer, being one of the authors), and give my students an introduction to what those rights are. For this, I use material provided by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs , which I think is beautif...

 In this project, which I created using online material provided by Centropa (particularly the stories of Otto & Kitty Suschny and of Kurt Brodmann ), students learn about the Kindertransport. Between Reichspogromnacht (9-10 November 1938) and the Nazi-German invasion of Poland (1 September 1939), about 10,000 children and teenagers from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia were brought to safety in Great Britain. Sometimes they arrived with one or more siblings, but most of them were on their own, and their parents stayed behind. With my students, I talk about the problems, challenges and dilemmas faced by the children (What to take with you, learning a new language, being lonely, making new friends, etc.) and their parents (Should I send my child, how can I make sure my son/daughter preserves his identity, what should I send with them, etc.). We also discuss how Jewish and non-Jewish individuals and organizations helped those children. Slowly but surely, my students - most ...

At the beginning of the unit, I tell the students to go to Wikipedia, find the entry on German Resistance to Nazism , and - alone or in pairs - choose one example (an individual or group of individuals) of Resistance, by Germans, against the Nazi regime. Each team or individual student then gives an ultra-short-presentation, answering Kipling's famous questions that a journalist should ask: "What and Why and When / And How and Where and Who". We discuss how the various forms of resistant were different and what they had in common, focusing on methods, goals and motivations. In the next (double) lesson and a half, we watch the movie Sophie Scholl: Die letzten Tage (2005) , using the DVD that I have of the movie, with English subtitles. After watching the movie, I ask the students to tell me at least one thing, anything, that they learnt from the movie and did not know before. Here are some of the responses, which I translated into German (for a presentation that I gave in ...