Yonathan Bar-On's Class and School Projects

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 ...

 In this unit, the students learn the sad story of 44 children, and their six adult caretakers, who lived in an orphanage of the French-Jewish organization OSE in Izieu, in the Ain department, France, near Lyon and the Swiss border. On 6 April 1944, members of the Lyon Gestapo, led by Klaus Barbie, raided the children's home. All the children and five of the six adults were sent to their deaths in Eastern Europe. I start by playing one of the most beautiful songs that I know in German, Reinhard Mey's "Die Kinder von Izieu".  At this stage of the lesson, the students have only a sheet with the song's lyrics , in German, with my English translation. I have also a Hebrew translation , which I use in classes whose students are less proficient in English. They are often surprised - some of them even shocked - when they understand (after asking what the language is: Yiddish? Dutch? German!) that I am playing them a song in German on or around International Holocaust Rem...

 Students watch excerpts from two movies, Conspiracy  2001, (a reconstruction, in English, of the Wannsee Conference, 21 January 1942) and Downfall (Der Untergang, 2004, about the last days of Hitler and the Nazi leadership in the Berlin bunker, April-May 1945). I use original DVDs that I bought in Germany, both with English subtitles (even though Conspiracy is in English). I tell the students to focus on the tiny details, minutiae, anything that catches their eye, that they find interesting, etc., and show them scenes that depict aspects of the perpetrators' side of the Holocaust that most of us never think of, for example: While Berlin was being destroyed above their heads, Hitler and his staff still had meals together Hitler, when he marries Eva Braun, is asked whether his background is Aryan Towards the end of his life, Hitler was very frail, his hands were shaking, his behavior was erratic The Jews remained the focus of his hatred and of his worldview The Wannsee Confer...

 This is one lesson that I give in classes that I usually do not teach. It includes some material that I use in projects in my own classes. Together with the students and their homeroom teachers, I listen to five songs in different languages: two in Yiddish, one in Ladino, one in French and one in German. I tell the stories behind the songs, and we discuss whatever the students notice in and infer from the lyrics (which I have all translated into Hebrew). They always share family stories, and recognize words, phrases, sometimes names in the songs, especially in the songs in Yiddish and Ladino (there are always a few students whose (great)grandparents speak or spoke either of those languages). Here are the five songs that we listen to: 1) Mayn Schvester Haye (My Sister Chaya) - Binem Heller/Chava Alberstein & the Klezmatics 2) Arvoles lloran por lluvia (written after 1492) - sung by rabbi Shuviel Maaravi 3) Die Kinder von Izieu - Reinhard Mey 4) Nuit et Brouillard - Jean Ferrat ...

For this project, students of three schools (the Koenigin Charlotte Gymnasium in Stuttgart; the Italian Carmelite School - Christian-Arab - in Haifa; the Leo Baeck Education Center - Jewish - in Haifa) have translated a Dutch children’s book into their native tongues (German, Arabic, Hebrew), based on the book’s English translation. Before, during and after their work on the translations, they discussed the book’s themes: (the dangers of) greed and materialism, compassion, selflessness, accepting ‘the other’, themes that are universal and play a central role in all three monotheistic religions. We managed to raise funds which enabled the publication of a printed edition of this very special trilingual version of the book. Koos Meinderts and Annette Fienieg, the author and illustrator (whose work is very popular in the Netherlands) have given us the right to use the text and the illustrations for such an edition. Outline of the story: A man lives in a house on a mountain, in the cloud...