Over 370 educators from 53 countries will participate in this week’s Eighth International Conference on Holocaust Education, “Telling the Story: Teaching the Core” at the International School for Holocaust Studies of Yad Vashem.

Educators from across the globe, including Japan, Venezuela, South Africa, Germany, Poland, India, the United States, Canada, Australia, Mexico, China, Great Britain, and more, will join together for three days of lectures, discussions, presentations and information sharing about the core issues of the Holocaust and how to meaningfully transmit them in the classroom and beyond. The conference opens on Monday evening, June 18, and concludes June 21, 2012. Many of the participants are graduates of Yad Vashem seminars.

“One of the main topics to be discussed in the conference is the challenge of making Holocaust education relevant in the 21st century,” explained Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev. “How can we properly teach the Shoah in such a fast-moving and dynamic world? And how should we deal with current trends that tend to blur the unique aspects of the Holocaust and create an indistinct understanding of its history? We must go back to the core issues of the Shoah: what actually happened in the ghettos, the camps, and during the ‘Final Solution,’ how the Nazi party instituted an atmosphere of hatred and dehumanization, and what were the Jewish, and non-Jewish, responses to it all. Only then can we use this knowledge to promote the protection of human rights, the prevention of genocide and the fight against intolerance – all of which are important and relevant topics in today’s world.”

The conference focuses on research, trends and approaches to Holocaust studies and education, and includes sessions on the “Lessons’ of the Holocaust and the Ceaseless, Discordant Search for Meaning”, “The Challenge of Making the Holocaust Relevant in a Changing World”, “The Place of the Holocaust in Jewish Education”, “The End of the Holocaust? Holocaust Memory in the 21st Century”, new research on the Final Solution and Ghettos, anti-Semitism and Nazi racial ideology, Jewish doctors and the Holocaust and more.

Among the speakers at the conference are Minister of Education Gideon Sa’ar, Prof. Michael Marrus, (University of Toronto), Prof. Alvin Rosenfeld (Indiana University), Prof. Yehuda Bauer (Yad Vashem), Rabbi Israel Meir Lau (Yad Vashem), Prof. Deborah Dwork (Clark University), Prof. Dina Porat (Yad Vashem), Prof. Dan Michman (Yad Vashem), Prof. Michael Berenbaum (American Jewish University), alongside educators and leaders of Holocaust centers from around the world.

The conference is taking place with the generous support of the Asper Foundation, the Adelson Family Foundation and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)