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The political, economical and cultural implications of the ever growing number of immigrants from Latin American countries into the US, has raised the issue of the future intellectual and political influence of the Hispanic community. The rapid growth of the Hispanic community suggests that American Jews should seek a better understanding of Jewish history within the Hispanic community. Current immigration to the US includes large number of youngsters, both Jews and non-Jews with little command of English. These youngsters will not have the opportunity to learn about the Holocaust in school unless we provide teachers with adequate Spanish language teaching materials. Immigrants from Latin America bring little knowledge about the Holocaust from their countries, a topic barely present in formal education throughout the continent. Most countries in Latin America do not include a separate course of study on the Holocaust within the curricula of middle schools and high schools. If at all addressed, the subject tends to be confronted superficially and teachers have little preparation for the "unteachable." As professor Ilan Stavans from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, explains in The Impact of the Holocaust in Latin America (I), "About half a million Jews live in Latin America ... the fifth-largest concentration of Jewish population on the globe ... most Latin Americans are not familiar even remotely with the word shoah... They would not understand what it means, how it connects... They wouldn't understand it in any way as connected to the genocide that Indians suffered or that other segments of the Latin American population have undergone. The semantics of the word is totally foreign to the region". Stavans diagnostic is clear: " For most of the Hispanic Americas, the Holocaust is still little acknowledged". Ignorance of Jewish history is further aggravated by the fact that some Hispanic youngsters have never had any contact with Jews in their lives. Programs of study on the Holocaust have been included in public schools in many areas in the USA. Implementation of such programs in the US, as elsewhere, has been hampered in many cases by linguistic and cultural barriers that makes it difficult to teach it to Hispanic youngsters. A particularly acute problem is the lack of Spanish-based teaching materials. For example, only a handful of films on the Holocaust have been produced in Latin America. The development and use of study materials in Spanish language could be these youngsters' last chance to learn about one of the greatest tragedy in the history of mankind. The primary target group is thus comprised by non-Jewish Hispanic middle and high school students that have recently immigrated into the US. A secondary target group should be Jewish-Hispanic middle and high school students that have recently migrated to the US. Many of these youngsters have had little previous contact with the subject as discussed above. We can barely hope to educate Hispanic non-Jewish youngsters on the Holocaust if we can not see that Latin American Jewish youngsters are knowledgeable of the subject and its implications. Jewish Hispanic middle and high school students could become powerful vehicles of hasbara, if they are provided with the appropriate tools in Spanish language. Local Jewish Latin American institutions at the middle and high school level have been increasingly unable to meet cultural challenges such as teaching the Holocaust -not only, but also, because they need to cope with growing and urgent demands for economical and social development. Jewish Hispanic youngsters , coming from such backgrounds, have to further confront alienation as a result of their immigration experience. They need their host community (Jewish organizations in the US) to recognize their special needs and develop suitable study materials. Despite Treblinka is a multilingual educational resource providing a multimedia environment to help teachers address this highly complex and emotional subject. This resource was designed and produced by a multidisciplinary ORT Uruguay University faculty team during 2001 under the leadership of Director General, Charlotte de Grunberg who herself survived the Holocaust as a hidden child in France. However, due to the severe economic crisis currently affecting the country, it has not been possible to raise locally the financial resources needed to undertake the second phase of this project, which concentrates on developing lesson plans and educational projects to help teach the holocaust to Spanish speaking audience. (I) The article is available at http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/fran/actu/actu01/doc2001/holla.html. An expert in the Holocaust and Latin America, Ilan Stavans is professor of Spanish at Amherst College. He is the author of The Essential Ilan Stavans (Routledge, New York and London, 2000) and Latino USA: A Cartoon History (Basic Books, New York, 2000), among other books. He is the editor of the series Jewish Latin America, published by the University of New Mexico Press. |
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Teaching
the Holocaust to Spanish speakers - Clips for
discussion - Synopsis - Film
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