Presented by: Faigy Schiff
Ganzach Kiddush Hashem is launching an innovative project this year in which approximately five hundred charedi (ultra-Orthodox) seminar students from across the country, aged eighteen and over, will participate. With the aim of creating active learning about the Holocaust, the students will engage in genealogical research using sources from Ganzach Kiddush Hashem’s archive and under the guidance of professional genealogists.
The students will research and reconstruct the family trees of five hundred Holocaust victims. The final products will be high-quality reports accompanied by family trees and a comprehensive overview of the topic being researched.
The program will provide students with historical education and research skills with the goal of creating a connection between the students and charedi figures – students from the Chachmei Lublin yeshiva and from Mrs. Sarah Schenirer’s Bais Yaakov seminar – who were murdered in the Holocaust. The goal is to perpetuate the memories of these victims and develop in the young researchers an emotional engagement with the memory of the Holocaust.
When a student receives a specific image of a student from before the war, she essentially creates a connection with the person, learns about their life and death, and in a certain sense rebuilds their world and life story and perhaps even continues the aspiration of that character whose life was cut short in the midst of its flowering. She also experiences the connection to the entire Jewish story.
The topics that the research will address in relation to the character being researched:
- Understanding the geographic area where the individual lived
- A look at the Jewish community where the person lived before the war
- The family’s journey during those years
- Understanding the nature of the institutions where the individual studied
Educational Activities:
- Building a family tree using sources – documents, records, testimonies
- Processing material from sources
- Storing and creating detailed reports based on the research
- Contacting living relatives of the person
- Researching the history of her family and the town she lived in – the impact of the war on them in the years before and after the war
Tools for the Students’ Use:
- Knowledge gained during the project: How to conduct genealogical research
- Basic use of computers
- Use of various programs to create a family tree
- Introduction to the different types of resources and their reliability – archives, libraries, testimonies
Skills They Will Acquire:
- Ability to process information
- Emotional readiness
- Focus on a holistic approach to Holocaust research
- Ability to process and present information
