How Jews Lived: Teaching About Pre-War Jewish Life Using the Centropa Archives

Catalog description

When teaching about the Holocaust, it is not enough to teach how Jews were murdered; we must also teach students how Jews lived. Likewise, it's not enough to teach Nazi stereotypes of Jews; we must educate students about the diversity of Jewish life in Europe before the war. Using the 1200 interviews and 23,000 digitized photographs of Jewish life in 15 Central and Eastern European countries collected by Centropa, we will explore the diversity of prewar European Jewish life (religious, social, economic, geographic). You will return to your students with a variety of ways to teach about how Jews lived, no matter how little time you have to teach about the Holocaust in your classes.