It is beneficial to use film, testimonies (of survivors, rescuers, liberators, and children of survivors), literature, Internet resources, and/or museum visits to engage students affectively in their studies. Care must be taken not to horrify younger students to the point that they are desensitized or refuse to relate to the issues. Sensitivity to the feelings of guilt or victimization that can arise is imperative.
The Shoah should not be the only context in which Jews and Judaism are encountered in a curriculum. Even within a Shoah course, Jews and Judaism should not be encountered only as the Shoah's victims or as perennial scapegoats of Christian persecutions.
The Shoah must also be confronted within various contexts of general European history, especially of Germany and Austria, but also of all the other countries in which the Nazis were able to operate. The differences between these contexts need to be brought out.
The instructor should be conscious of the moral imperative to construct a memory of the Shoah that will positively influence the moral formation of students. In a Catholic setting, students should come to accept and regret that the perpetrators, bystanders, and cowed majority in Europe came from within the Christian community. Similarly, Jewish students should come to identify with the victims. Both Catholic and Jewish students should also learn something about the more positive relations between Jews and Catholics as fellow immigrants in America. The need to create this memory and identification should shape the structure of the course. The formation of an empathetic imagination for the memories and sensibilities of others should also be pursued.
Students must be conscious that this construction of memory is different depending on the person?s entry into identification (positive or negative) with the people involved in the Shoah. They should be aware that memory of the Shoah for Jews is necessarily a radically different memory from that of most Christians. The distinctive victimization of such groups as Poles and other Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, and the physically or mentally impaired also has an impact on the construction of memory of individual students.
While the Shoah was in many respects a unique event, victims of the all-too-numerous other incidents of mass murder will find analytical distinctions trivial to their experience of suffering.
The issues of the Shoah and of Jewish-Christian relations are vast topics that most students will encounter only as elective offerings in their total programs of study. Yet their enormous importance requires their integration wherever possible throughout the Catholic curricula. This is especially, though not solely, important for seminaries and theological schools. In biblical studies, for example, courses on books of the Shared Testament (Hebrew Scriptures) should convey esteem for the profundity and permanence of Israel?s experience of God and its inspired sacred texts. Courses on the New Testament will benefit from taking seriously the Jewishness of Jesus and the Apostles, and of the Evangelists, Paul and other authors of the New Testament. They can help improve future sermons and Catholic texts by confronting honestly the anti-Jewish potential of certain passages, especially those concerning the crucifixion, the Pharisees, the Torah [Law], and the permanence of Israel?s covenant.24 Christological courses will be enriched by accurately reflecting the complexities of Judaism in late antiquity as the context of Jesus? teaching and of the early Church?s understanding of the significance of the Christ event.
In courses in patristic studies the pervasive - and now repudiated - idea that Christianity replaced or "superseded" Judaism in God?s plan of salvation needs to be challenged. Here, it is worthy of note: "It has rightly been stressed that of all the documents promulgated by the Second Vatican Council, that on the Jews [Nostra Aetate] is the only one which contains no reference whatsoever to any of the Church's teachings - patristic, conciliar, or pontifical. This alone shows the revolutionary character of the act."25 Courses on church history and European history will benefit greatly when seen from the vantage point of the perennially marginalized Jewish community, the only religious tradition in Europe that pre-dated Christianity and still exists intact and in continuity with its past.
Homiletics courses and courses devoted to the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults can explore the relationship between the two testaments of the Christian Bible so as to avoid presentations that explicitly or subtly promote supersessionism. Ethics courses can examine the situations and behaviors of the churches during the Shoah, and benefit from the "double lens" of how Christians and Jews over the centuries have variously interpreted the moral commandments of the Scriptures we share.
To understand the liturgical renewal of the twentieth century and the origins of much that is central to Christian practice, the Jewish roots of our forms of worship need to be understood. Spirituality courses can treat the writings of Jewish commentators and mystics.
These issues need to be integrated into other parts of the daily life of Catholic educational institutions through special events such as commemorations of Yom Hashoah (the Jewish day of remembering the victims of the Holocaust), film showings, drama, art exhibits, colloquia and public lectures, joint pilgrimages and retreats with Jewish clergy and laity, and faculty and student exchanges like the American Jewish Committee?s CJEEP (Catholic-Jewish Educational Exchange Program).
Similarly, the Bishops' Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Relations (亚色影库EIA) sought to implement locally the Holy See's statements of 1974 and 1985 with the 1975 NCCB Statement on Catholic-Jewish Relations and our own 1988 Criteria for the Evaluation of Dramatizations of the Passion (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference). The Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy further drew out the liturgical implications of the Holy See's 1985 statement in its own statement, God's Mercy Endures Forever: Guidelines on the Presentation of Jews and Judaism in Catholic Preaching (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1989). The Holy See's 1998 statement We Remember, along with related statements of European and U.S. bishops' conferences, is contained in Catholics Remember the Holocaust (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1998). In We Remember, the Holy See wisely uses the Hebrew word Shoah to describe the Holocaust. While not diminishing the suffering of Nazism's many other victims, such as the Romani (Gypsies) and Poles, this term preserves a central focus on Nazism's central victim-group, God's People, the Jews. The present reflection follows this precedent.
John Paul II's Address to the Jewish Community of Australia, November 26, 1986. This and other papal texts on Jews and Judaism between 1979 and 1995 can be found, with introduction and commentary, in John Paul II, Spiritual Pilgrimage: Texts on Jews and Judaism, eds. Eugene Fisher and Leon Klenicki (New York: Crossroad, 1995).
John Paul II, Speech to Symposium on the Roots of Anti-Judaism, October 31, 1997. L'Osservatore Romano 6:1 (November 6, 1997).
We Remember, Part 5. In Catholics Remember the Holocaust, p. 54. On the distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism, see Part 4.
Ibid., p. 55.
In a 1985 statement, the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews had this to say regarding Catholic teachings on Judaism: "The urgency and importance of precise, objective and rigorously accurate teaching on Judaism for our faithful follows too from the danger of anti-semitism which is always ready to reappear under different guises. The question is not merely to uproot from among the faithful the remains of anti-semitism still to be found here and there, but much rather to arouse in them, through educational work, an exact knowledge of the wholly unique 'bond' (Nostra Aerate, 4) which joins us as a Church to the Jews and to Judaism" Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church (June 24, 1985), section 1, no. 8. In Catholic Jewish Relations: Documents from the Holy See (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1999).
Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing of the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate, no. 4 (December 1, 1974), preamble. In Catholic Jewish Relations.
John Paul II, Address in the Great Synagogue of Rome (April 13, 1986), no. 6. In Spiritual Pilgrimage, p. 65.
Addressing the Jewish leaders of Warsaw on June 14, 1987, the Holy Father expanded his vision of ongoing Jewish witness to include the Shoah itself: "I think that today.., you have become a loud warning voice for all humanity.... More than anyone else, it is precisely you who have become this saving warning .... in this sense you continue your particular vocation, showing yourselves to be still the heirs of that election to which God is faithful. This is your mission in the contemporary world before the peoples, the nations, all of humanity, the Church. And in this Church all peoples and nations feel united to you in this mission." In Spiritual Pilgrimage, p. 99.
John Paul II, On the Coming of the Third Millennium (Tertio Millennio Adveniente), no. 33 (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1994).
We Remember, part 2. In Catholics Remember the Holocaust, p. 49.
"We would risk causing the victims of the most atrocious deaths to die again if we do not have an ardent desire for justice, if we do not commit ourselves to ensure that evil does not prevail over good as it did for millions of the children of the Jewish people... Humanity cannot permit all that to happen again." We Remember, part 5, citing John Paul II. In Catholics Remember the Holocaust, p. 55.
Catholics Remember the Holocaust, p. 2.
The text of Cardinal Cassidy's "Reflections Regarding the Vatican's Statement on the Shoah,' originally published in Origins, is included in Catholics Remember the Holocaust, pp. 61-76.
International Theological Commission, Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past, in Origins 29:39 (March 16, 2000): 625-644.
Ibid., no. 3.3.
Ibid.
We Remember, part 5. In Catholics Remember the Holocaust, p. 54. See also Memory and Reconciliation, nos. 3.4 and 5.4.
It should be noted that Jews were never expelled from Italy, where papal authority continued the tradition of protection of Jews. Likewise, many Jews found refuge in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, which by the twentieth century enjoyed the largest Jewish population in the world.
See Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb (亚色影库EIA chairman) "Commemorating the [50th Anniversary of the] Liberation of Auschwitz." In Catholics Remember the Holocaust, pp. 16-20.
Memory and Reconciliation, no. 2.1.
We Remember, part 5. In Catholics Remember the Holocaust, p. 54.
Cf. Cardinal William H. Keeler, "Lessons to Learn from Catholic Rescuers." In Catholics Remember the Holocaust, pp. 29-30.
See God's Mercy Endures Forever.
Gerhart M. Riegner, Nostra Aerate: Twenty Years After. In International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee, Fifteen Years of Catholic-Jewish Dialogue, 1970-1985: Selected Papers, p. 276 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1988).
Historical Documentation and Church Teachings
Blet, Pierre. Pius XII and the Second World War According the Archives of the Vatican (Paulist,1999). Survey of the documentation made available by the Holy See, and a gripping narrative of how it reacted, virtually day by day, to the events of the War and of the Shoah.
Blet, Pierre, Angelo Martini, and Burkhardt Schneiders, eds. Actes et documents du Saint Si?ge relatifs ? la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1965-80. Eleven volumes of documentation
Fisher, Eugene. Faith Without Prejudice: Rebuilding Christian Attitudes toward Judaism. New York: Crossroad, 1993)
Fisher, Eugene, and Leon Klenicki. Spiritual Pilgrimage: John Paul II on Jews and Judaism, Texts and Documents 1979-1995. New York: Crossroad, 1995.
_______., In Our Age: The Flowering of Jewish-Catholic Dialogue. New York: Paulist Press, 1990. Provides texts and commentary on the statements of the Holy See from the 1965 declaration of the Second Vatican Council to 1986. For texts up to 1998 see Catholic-Jewish Relations: Documents from the Holy See (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1999).
International Theological Commission of the Holy See. Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past. March 8, 2000. Origins 29:39 (March 16, 2000): 625-644.
Garber, Zev and Richard Libowitz. Peace in Deed: Essays in Honor of H. J. Cargas. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998.
Garber, Zev et.al., eds. Methodology in the Academic Teaching of the Holocaust. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1999. Seventeen essays on theory and methods, teaching others, literature and arts, and surveys and reports.
Haynes, Stephen R. Holocaust Education and the Church-Related College: Restoring Ruptured Traditions. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Critical reflection on the state of Holocaust education in Protestant-related settings, its mandates and challenges.
Millen, Rochelle L. et.al, eds. New Perspectives on the Holocaust: A Guide for Teachers and Scholars. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Twenty-five essays on the context of the Holocaust, issues of teaching and curriculum, and spiritual and moral issues.
Napolitano, Daniel C. The Holocaust: A Teaching Guide for Catholic Schools. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1999.
Shimoni, Gideon, ed. The Holocaust in University Teaching. New York: Pergamon Press, 1991. Four methodological articles and twenty-six syllabi, heavily drawn from Jewish faculty.
The Shoah and Religious Reflection
Berenbaum, Michael. After Tragedy and Triumph: Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
_______. Elie Wiesel, God, the Holocaust, and the Children of Israel. West Orange, N.J.: Behrman House, 1994).
_______. The Vision of the Void: Theological Reflections on the Works of Elie Wiesel. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979).
_______, ed. A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis. New York: New York University Press, 1990.
Brenner, Reev Robert. The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors. New York: Free Press, 1980.
Brown, Robert McAfee. Elie Wiesel, Messenger to All Humanity. Rev. ed. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1989.
Eckardt, A. Roy and Alice L. Eckardt. Long Night?s Journey into Day: Life and Faith After the Holocaust. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982).
Fiorenza, Elisaabeth Sch?ssler and David Tracy, eds. The Holocaust as Interruption: A Quest for Christian Theology. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1984.
Fleischner, Eva, ed. Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?: Reflections on the Holocaust. New York: KTAV Publishing Co., 1977.
Garber, Zev. Shoah: The Paradigmatic Genocide. Lanham, Md.: University of America Press, 1994.
Jacobs, Steven. The Holocaust Now: Contemporary Christian and Jewish Thought. East Rockaway, N.Y.: Cummings & Hathaway, 1996.
Littell, Franklin H. The Crucifixion of the Jews. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
______, and Hubert G. Locke, eds. The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1974.
Littel, Marcia Sachs and Sharon Weissman. Liturgies on the Holocaust: An Interfaith Anthology. New and rev. ed. Valley Forge, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 1996.
Morley, John I. Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust, 1939-1943. New York: KtavPublishing Co., 1980.
Peck, Abraham J., ed. Jews and Christians After the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Fortress,1982.
Rittner, Carol and John K. Roth. From the Unthinkable to the Unknowable: American Christian and Jewish Scholars Encounter the Holocaust. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997.
Roth, John and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications. New York: Paragon House, 1989.
Schulweis, Harold M. "A Jewish Theology for Post-Holocaust Healing," Midstream (August / September 1987): 44-46.
Wiesenthal, Simon, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. Rev. ed. New York: Schocken, 1998.
Axelrod, Toby. Rescuers Defying the Nazis: Non-Jewish Teens Who Rescued Jews. New York: Rosen,1999.
Bartoszewski, Wladyslaw and Zofia Lewin, eds., Righteous among Nations: How Poles Helped the Jews, 1939-1945. London: Earlscourt Publications, 1969.
Fisher, Eugene J. "Faith in Humankind: Rescuers of Jews in the Holocaust," Journal of Ecumenical Studies 21 (1984): 636-37.
Fogelman, Eva. Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.
Friedman, Philip. Their Brothers' Keepers. New York: Holocaust Library, 1978.
Gies, Miep, with Alison Leslie Gold. Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
Gushee, David P. The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: A Christian Interpretation. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1994.
Hallie, Philip. Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.
Hellman, Peter. Avenue of the Righteous. New York: Atheneum Books, 1980.
Herzer, Ivo, Klaus Voigt and James Burgwyn, eds. The Italian Refuge: Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989.
Keneally, Thomas. Schindler?s List. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Kurek-Lesik, Ewa. Your Life Is Worth Mine: How Polish Nuns Saved Jewish Children in Poland, 1939-1945. New York: Hippocrene, 1997.
Leboucher, Fernande. The Incredible Mission [of Father Benoit]. Trans. J. F. Bernard. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1969.
Lyman, Darryl. Holocaust Rescuers: Stories of Courage. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1999.
Marchione, Margherita. Yours Is a Precious Witness: Memoirs of Jews and Catholics in Wartime Italy. New York: Paulist, 1997.
Michalczyk, John J., ed. Resisters, Rescuers & Refugees: Historical and Ethical Issues. Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed & Ward, 1997.
Oliner, Samuel P. and Pearl M. The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. New York: Free Press, 1992. Foreword by Harold M. Schulweis.
Paldiel, Mordecai. The Path of Righteousness: Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav Publishing Co., 1993.
Phayer, Michael, and Eva Fleischner. Cries in the Night: Women Who Challenged the Holocaust. Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed & Ward, 1997.
Ramati, Alexander. The Assisi Underground: The Priests Who Rescued Jews. New York: Stein & Day, 1978.
Rosenfeld, Harvey. Raoul Wallenberg. Rev. ed. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1995.
Schulweis, Harold M. "They Were Our Brothers' Keepers," Moment 11:5 (May 1996): 47-50.
Stein, Andr?. Quiet Heroes: True Stories of the Rescue of Jews by Christians in Nazi-Occupied Holland. New York: New York University Press, 1988.
Tec, Nehama. When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Ten Boom, Corrie. The Hiding Place. London: Hodder & Straughton, 1971.
Wood, E. Thomas and Stanislaw M. Jankowski. Karski: One Man to Stop the Holocaust. New York: John Wiley, 1994). Foreword by Elie Wiesel.
Zuccotti, Susan. The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
Selected Films (sources in parentheses listed below)
In addition to the following representative list, more film references can be found on many websites in the next section.
The Assissi Underground. 115 minutes. Color. MGM Home Entertainment, 1982. Videocassette. The clandestine activities of priests and nuns to save Jews during the Nazi occupation of Italy. (SSSS)
Au Revoir Les Enfants. 103 minutes. B/W. Orion Home Video, 1989. Videocassette. True story of a Catholic schoolboy and his Jewish friend who was sheltered by a Carmelite priest in France. (SSSS)
The Courage to Care. 30 minutes. Color. Anti-Defamation League, 1986. Videocassette. Six individuals who knowingly risked their lives to rescue Jews. (ADL)
The Diary of Anne Frank. 151 minutes. B/W. Twentieth-Century Fox, 1959. Videocassette. Anne Frank and her family attempt to escape Nazi persecution by hiding in an attic for two years. (SSSS)
Holocaust. 7-1/2 hours. Color. Republic Pictures Home VIdeo, 1978. Videocassettes (3). N亚色影库-TV miniseries of the lives of two families living in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. (SSSS)
Night and Fog 32 minutes. Color, B/W. Home Vision, 1955. Videocassette. Elie Wiesel?s classic of survival in the death camps. (SSSS)
Weapons of the Spirit. 90 minutes. Color, B/W. First Run Features, 1989. Videocassette. The moving story of a small Protestant village in France, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, which sheltered 5,000 Jews under Nazi occupation. Optional study guide package. (SSSS)
Sources
ADL = Anti-Defamation League, 823 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017
SSSS = Social Studies School Service, 10200 Jefferson Boulevard, Room J , P.O. Box 802, Culver City, CA 90232-0802
Valuable resources are available from Facing History and Ourselves (some geared more to high school) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, especially their Teaching About the Holocaust: A Resource Book for Educators which includes an annotated bibliography and videography. See their web sites.
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Jewish-Christian Relations
Includes numerous useful documents, essays, and annotated bibliographies.
Yad VaShem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem
Cybrary of the Holocaust
Images, stories, and more.
Spring Hill College Theology Library
The Holocaust/Shoah Page
Glossary, chronology, and documents.
Vatican: The Holy See
Official Vatican website for Church documentation.
National Conference of Catholic Bishops
American Jewish Committee
Anti-Defamation League
Holocaust Teacher Resource Center
Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies
Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust
World Council of Churches
National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education
Service International de Documentation Jud?o-Chr?tienne
In English and French
Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College