For the past 20 years, Karen Bidus has read “The Diary of Anne Frank” with 6th, 7th and 8th grade students, at Trinity Lutheran School in Tinley Park. As part of the lesson, she’s given some students the chance to role play the people in the book, and includes background about life under Nazi rule. She’s also taken a class to the Museum of Science and Industry’s Anne Frank: The Exhibition.
“By making it a personal connection, they feel a little bit more in tune with the Holocaust,” said Bidus.
Bidus recently had a chance to make make a more personal connection through an Alfred Lerner Fellowship with the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous Summer Institute for Teachers, where Bidus and several dozen other middle and high school teachers, along with educators from across the U.S. and Poland, learned teaching strategies to convey the story of the Holocaust genocide to new generations.
“It’s more than just teaching historical facts,” said Bidus. “It’s about teaching our current day students about empathy, caring for others, having them envisioning themselves: Could they have done it, given food to a Jewish person, have a Jewish person stay in their home?
The lessons of the Holocaust and the response from community members remains as relevant as ever, she said.
“Unfortunately, in today’s society a lot of people just don’t have the empathy or caring for each other in general,” said Bidus.
The Righteous Summer Institute for Teachers, an intensive five-day course, offered Bidus and other participants a closer look at the history of the Holocaust and anti-Judaism and antisemitism, as well as current-day antisemitism. It included presentations by scholars and speakers such as Avinoam Patt of New York University, Benjamin Carter Hett of Hunter College, John Q. Barrett of St. John’s University, Lawrence R. Douglas of Amherst College and renowned Holocaust historian and exhibition curator Paul Salmons from the United Kingdom.
There was also a chance to meet with other educators to discuss what they’d learned and how they might convey it to their students.
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Bidus has already attended various professional development sessions at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center but wanted to know even more.
“You feel like you know it all, but I said, there’s plenty of things to learn,” she said.
Stanlee Stahl, who leads the Jewish Foundation, brought the issue alive during the institute, which took place in June in Newark, New Jersey, Bidus said.
“She was telling us it was not 6 million murdered, it was 6 million individual lives snuffed out,” she said.
Amanda Friedeman, associate director of education at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, nominated Bidus for the fellowship.
“Karen is an engaged and thoughtful teacher who helps her students understand not just the events of the Holocaust, but the human dimension of the history as well — the people involved, and the lessons students can learn and apply to their world today,” said Friedeman.
One of the things Bidus said she’d be adding to her curriculum in the wake of attending the institute is more about the helpers, such as the family who sheltered the Frank family.
“I think sometimes those people go unmentioned,’ she said. “They could walk around society knowing they were keeping a big secret.”
Janice Neumann is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.