News

Idaho Statesman | August 20, 2021 | By Scott McIntosh

(Excerpt) In a previous editorial, I spoke with the director of the Holocaust Center for Humanity about why these comparisons are so damaging to the effort to remember what the Holocaust was, so that we may learn from that atrocity and prevent it from ever happening again.

“I think what it does is it trivializes the Holocaust,” Dee Simon, executive director of the center, told me last year. “It allows us to think of it as not as unique as it was, the idea of the government murdering 6 million people ... with complicit individuals murdering millions of people.”

Read the entire article

Statement from the Holocaust Center for Humanity - June 1, 2020

Our Center’s mission includes three very important words, “preserve human dignity.” Human dignity was not given to George Floyd.

As our streets are exploding in protest, the death of George Floyd shouldn’t be seen as a stand-alone incident but as a societal shortfall which continues to plague our country. History has shown us that countries that reconcile with their history of violence and injustice emerge greater for their efforts. Germany and Rwanda are examples of countries that found the strength to confront their past.

After 250 years of slavery and 150 more years of injustice and systemic racism, what we see today on our streets is a cry for overdue action.

Our mission statement also includes the words “take action.”

  • As many of us think of how we can make a difference, please take the time to review this list of ways to promote racial justice.  
  • To take action through education, share this list of 31 books that support conversations on race, racism, and resistance with young readers.
  • For over three years, our Center has been taking action by training Seattle Police Department officers in our Holocaust museum to think critically about individual responsibility and maintaining core values. 

As an institution that works to share the universal lessons of the Holocaust, we stand in unity with the African American community and remain dedicated to empowering individuals to learn from the past, fight for human dignity, and take action.

In partnership and peace.

Dee Signature

 

Dee Simon
Baral Family Executive Director
Holocaust Center for Humanity

Real Change | January 26, 2022 | By Dee Simon

International Holocaust Remembrance Day marks the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on Jan. 27, 1945. It is a day that the United Nations set aside so that the world would never forget the tragedy that defined the word “genocide.”

The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Six million Jewish men, women and children were murdered. Hundreds of thousands of others were targeted, including Roma, people with disabilities, Poles, gay men, Germans of African heritage, Jehovah’s Witnesses and political dissidents.

By observing this day of remembrance, we honor the survivors and victims of the Holocaust. We give ourselves the opportunity to reflect on the moral responsibilities of individuals, societies and governments. On this day, we challenge ourselves to actively fight hate in all its forms. 

Read the entire article

Kent School District | November 2019

Each year, the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle holds a Voices for Humanity Luncheon, where they highlight stories of local students and teachers who have been inspired by the lessons of the Holocaust to stand up for what's right. This year, three Kent School District students were featured and spoke at the event to an audience of almost one thousand people.  Kent-Meridian High School students Abdullah Majeed and Matthew Sylvester and Kentridge High School student Rumela Weldeyesus shared their experiences learning about the holocaust, personal stories about prejudice and hatred, and their commitment to creating a better world. 

"After learning about the Holocaust, I know I want to be a person who will speak up for others and be a good person in my life,” Abdullah said. 

Last year, the students learned about the Holocaust in Paul Regelbrugge’s classroom at Meeker Middle School and had the opportunity to hear from Holocaust survivor Henry Friedman. Friedman's story inspired them to enter the Holocaust Center’s Writing, Art, and Film Contest

Regelbrugge now works at the Holocaust Center developing ways to help educators across the state teach about the Holocaust and inspire students of all ages to confront bigotry and indifference, promote human dignity, and take action. 

“I want to be an upstander,” Abdullah said. “I will always try to honor Mr. Friedman and the other survivors who I learned about at the museum. I want to try to tell other students about what I learned." 

Key Peninsula News | December 30, 2021 | By Grace Nesbit 

At the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle there is a student leadership board for students from all over Washington who learn about the Holocaust and related issues, such as genocide, antisemitism and prejudice. I am proud to say that this is my second year on the board.

What I have learned there suggests our society is moving backward. 

One of the common themes in Holocaust education is preventing mass genocide from happening again. However, all around the world genocides have recently occurred or are occurring: Xinjiang, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Syria, Myanmar and in many other places. 

How many of those have you heard of? Maybe one or two?

We in America have tunnel vision, which filters out every problem that doesn’t affect us.

Read the entire article

The Seattle Times | September 24, 2019 | By Nina Shapiro

 

David Frockt, the Seattle legislator, went to San Diego this spring for a bar mitzvah, the religious initiation ceremony for a Jewish boy who has reached the age of 13. At the synagogue stood two armed guards.

“Sadly, this is the reality of Jewish life in 2019,” said Frockt, noting that weeks before the bar mitzvah, a man walked into a synagogue 20 miles north of San Diego and opened fire, killing a woman who jumped in front of the rabbi. He thinks about that, and other recent violence against Jews, when he takes his own kids to synagogue in Seattle, worrying for their safety.

“Honestly, it crosses my mind every time,” the Democrat said.

He told the story Tuesday as Jewish leaders released a statement against anti-Semitism six months in the making. They are asking elected and civic officials to sign a separate pledge to fight such hatred. About 80 have already done so, including members of Congress, the Legislature and Seattle and King County councils.

The effort started after the October shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue that killed 11, and gained momentum amid an uptick in reported anti-Semitic incidents in Washington, along with other kinds of hate crimes.

While a fatal shooting took place in 2006 at the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, there’s a new and visceral unease many Jews are feeling now, said federation President and CEO Nancy Greer. “I have not experienced this level of edginess or fear,” she said.

Even so, Greer said before the news conference at the Holocaust Center for Humanity in downtown Seattle, coming up with a statement “took some time to really have deep discussions.” She explained, “The Jewish community is complex. Organizations came from across religious and political perspectives.”

One of the challenges was simply defining anti-Semitism, taking into account thorny issues like if and when criticism of Israel crosses that line.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tracks reports of anti-Semitic incidents across the country taken from police documents, the media and watchdog investigations. In Washington last year, the ADL’s database cites 32 incidents, up from 20 the year before. They include many instances of graffiti, with a swastika being a common image, found everywhere from a park bathroom in Seattle to a fence in Maple Valley to a dry erase board at Whitman College in Walla Walla. A Jewish woman in Seattle also had her garage and pavement outside her home spray-painted with the words “Jew” and “(expletive) Jew thieve.”

Alt-right and white-nationalist groups have also distributed anti-Semitic flyers in the region, according to the database. Occasionally, anti-Semitism has turned confrontational, with one woman and child in Seattle verbally accosted outside by someone yelling slurs.

The ADL also collects information about other types of extremist and white-supremacist incidents, reports of which are also increasing in Washington, from 18 in 2017 to 45 last year.

Jewish leaders at the news conference acknowledged their common ground with others facing hate. Also attending was Nina Martinez, board chair of Latino Civic Alliance, an advocacy group, who spoke about verbal and physical assaults on immigrants in rural parts of the state. Even kids, she said, are spit upon, pushed and told “you’re illegal” or “go back to your country.”

She said she worked with Jewish leaders for the first time during the last legislative session on a bill that increased the penalties for hate crimes.  “Phenomenal,” she said of their efforts, impressed by their energy and willingness to invest resources in the cause. The bill passed.

“They understood about our challenges,” Martinez added of Jewish leaders. “Sometimes we didn’t have to say too much.”

Still, there was a lot to talk about when it came to the statement on anti-Semitism.

Many agree such hate is on the rise, says Noam Pianko, a University of Washington (UW) professor of Jewish studies. “The real debate and difficulty is trying to understand where the anti-Semitism is coming from and how to address it.”

Liberals denounce far-right hate they feel has seeped into the mainstream under President Donald Trump, obscured by a pro-Israel stance. Conservatives find anti-Semitism in the harsh criticism of Israel on the left, and the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

Complicating it even more is that even liberal Jews have historically seen criticism of Israel the same way. In the past, Jews who took issue with Israeli policies were often labeled “self-hating Jews,” said Susan Glenn, another UW professor of Jewish studies.

Rabbi Jason Levine of Temple Beth Am, who participated in hammering out the statement, said, “it was very important to us that anti-Semitism did not become a partisan issue.”

As such, the final product, signed by 46 synagogues and Jewish organizations, says “antisemitism is found across the ideological spectrum.” While condemning “virulent antagonism toward Israel” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israel policy to that of the Nazis,” the statement also says, “it is important to note that criticism of Israeli government policies is not inherently anti-Semitic.”

The statement is not meant to definitively say whether any given remark or action is anti-Semitic, says Greer of the Jewish Federation, but to serve as a “starting point” for questions and conversation.

Sometimes, said Dee Simon, executive director of the Holocaust Center, “perpetrators don’t know what they’re doing.” She referred to the Mercer Island teens photographed this spring giving a Nazi salute. A week later, their parents brought them into the center, which displays pictures and artifacts documenting the history of the Holocaust.

She didn’t ask why they did what they did. She wanted to give them a tour like they were anybody else. They seemed engaged and asked lots of questions, she was pleased to note.

“One kid at a time,” she said.

The Washington Post | February 3, 2022 | By Caitlin Gibson 

During Paul Regelbrugge’s 12 years as a middle school English teacher, he saw firsthand the power of teaching Holocaust history through literature — not just for the adolescents in his classrooms but for their families, too. His former students and their parents still write to him, he says, to share how certain works — such as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” a memoir of Wiesel’s experience in concentration camps, and Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a Pulitzer-Prize winning graphic novel in which Jews are drawn as mice and Nazis are depicted as cats — have stayed with them, often revisited in family discussions.

So when news spread that a Tennessee school board had voted unanimously in January to remove “Maus” from its 8th grade curriculum, citing objections to nudity and profanity in the text, Regelbrugge, who is now director of education for the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle, found himself receiving messages from former students once again. This time they were forwarding news stories about the ban, along with their own astonished reactions: Have you heard about this? How could they do this?

Read the entire article

Key Peninsula News | July 1, 2019 | By Alice Kinerk

In recent weeks, four Key Peninsula Middle School students, Madison Robbins, Deven Loska, Grace Nesbit and Mia Stitt, received honors for their creative photography and filmmaking skills in two regional contests.

...

This spring, KPMS teacher Vicky Schauer taught her class about the Holocaust as part of the eighth-grade curriculum. Afterward, students were assigned to research more about the live s of the individuals in the books they had read.

This inspired eighth-grader Deven Loska to draw portraits of several Holocaust survivors. Her work earned her Honorable Mention in the Writing, Art & Film Contest at the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle.

Classmates Grace Nesbit and Mia Stitt responded to what they learned in Schauer’s class by producing a brief documentary film telling the story of Carla Peperzak. Peperzak, a Dutch resistance fighter, disguised herself as a German nurse to rescue Jews from trains, found hiding places for those who managed to escape, published an underground newspaper, and created fake identification papers and ration cards. The eighth-graders’ film received first place for their age group in the Holocaust Center contest.

Creating a documentary went far above and beyond the class assignment. “We went to Mrs. Schauer’s room every day at lunch for two weeks to work on it,” Grace said.

“Mrs. Schauer helped us a lot. She helped outline each slide and helped with the filming we were doing. She connected us with other teachers. We couldn’t have done it without her,” Mia said.

Schauer, who has taught Key Peninsula eighth graders about the Holocaust since 2007, was happy to help . “When Grace and Mia came to me with an idea for entering a film, I was thrilled. We spent many hours storyboarding, shooting scenes, writing scripts and learning more about the subject of their film. Then we reached out to resources such as Garrett Morrow (KPFD 16 Fire Chief Morrow’s 19-year-old son), to help edit, teacher Gary Alsin to help with the graphics, and teacher Richard Miller to compress the film file. As this whole production took place during state testing, it was very challenging to meet our deadline. They persisted. Just like the subject of their film,” Schauer said.

The film ends with a scene of soldiers in boots transforming to feet of students walking down a school hallway. “We wanted to take the idea of the Holocaust and compare it to something today. Bullies single people out. We wanted to show that it is really quite similar,” Grace said. “The message is that one voice can change things. Standing up can have an impact.”

The event served a dual purpose of honoring winners and celebrating the signing of a new bill in the Washington Legislature that supports Holocaust education. A Holocaust survivor oversaw the ceremony and gave the KPMS students their award. “Henry Friedman was Master of Ceremonies and presented the award to the students, and also autographed copies of his new book for the students. Mia and Grace then were allowed to screen their film. The girls were fantastic representatives of all of our eighth-grade students,” Schauer said.

Having the students’ work acknowledged by a person who had lived through the Holocaust himself was a highlight of the experience. “It was absolutely a once in a lifetime opportunity. It was a beautiful ceremony with an audience full of Holocaust survivors and their family members. Mia and Grace’s video was shown and they both gave brief speeches,” Mia’s mother, Beth Stitt, said.

For Grace’s mother, Anne Nesbit, the connections the students made between history and the world around them was crucial. “I am proud that they tied their message to bullying and emphasized that just one person can make a difference. The fact that young people have a voice and that the Holocaust Center for Humanity acknowledged them was not lost,” she said.

FM News 101 KXL | March 16, 2022 

Battle Ground, Wash. – Battle Ground High School world history teacher Amanda Fulfer is headed to Poland this July as a part of a program put on by the Holocaust Center for Humanity.

Fulfer tells KXL News “It’s a once in a life time opportunity.”

Fulfer says her background is in East Asian studies, but at the beginning of the pandemic when schools switched to online and changed some of its curriculum, she was told she’d be the only one teaching a brand new European history class and had to figure out how to prepare for it on her own. While prepping she quickly became fascinated by the story of the Holocaust and felt a calling to share those stories from that period to future generations. In Poland she’ll visit Auschwitz Birkenau, the Warsaw Ghetto and Schindler’s factory, saying it will give her a powerful perspective into what she teaches

Read the entire article

4Culture | June 25, 2019 | by Sydney Dratel

The Holocaust Center for Humanity teaches the lessons of the Holocaust, inspiring students of all ages to confront bigotry and indifference, promote human dignity, and take action. In this guest post, Grants Manager and Communications Associate Sydney Dratel shares about the process of enacting change in education:

Founded in 1989, we are a museum and educational resource center that uses the Holocaust as a lens through which to engage and educate our community on issues of discrimination, tolerance, civic engagement, and the difference one person can make. From fall 2018 through spring 2019, the Holocaust Center worked with Washington State Senator Ann Rivers, the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, and the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to research, draft, and ultimately pass into law bipartisan Holocaust education bill SB5612.

In 1992, three years after our organization’s founding, Holocaust survivors and Holocaust Center staff lobbied for a Washington State Holocaust education mandate. However, the bill that passed was a curriculum recommendation, which did not have a large enough impact on Holocaust education in Washington State. Three decades later, in 2018, Holocaust education was still an issue, and retired teacher Hannelore Tweed—who taught history for 30 years at Camas High School, supplemented with many Holocaust Center resources—approached Senator Ann Rivers about lobbying for stronger Holocaust education legislation in our state.

In October, I traveled to La Center along with our Baral Family Executive Director Dee Simon, a lobbyist, and an employee of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle to meet with Senator Ann Rivers about this legislation. In response to this successful meeting, we spent months researching, drafting, writing, and rewriting the language of the bill. We included the teaching of other genocides and crimes against humanity and the stipulation that the Holocaust Center for Humanity would work with OSPI to create guidelines and best practices for these topics. Also added was a clause stating that after two years, the Holocaust Center will make recommendations to the state on the future of Holocaust education in Washington.

After gathering support from dozens of teachers and organizations across the state, a group of Holocaust Center staff traveled to Olympia with Holocaust survivors, members of our Teacher Advisory Board, and a member of our Student Leadership Board to testify in front of the House and Senate Education committees. None of the teachers, students, or survivors had testified in support of legislative bills before, but their passion for this bill helped them brush aside their nerves, and each person gave compelling, personal, and powerful testimony.

We were thrilled to see that SB5612 was widely embraced by senators and representatives, passing unanimously through both education committ ees. Legislators’ votes were often accompanied by moving remarks by those who had family histories related to World War II and the Holocaust and therefore understood first-hand the importance of Holocaust education. This bill is a huge step towards ensuring that every student in our state has equal access to quality Holocaust education.

Studies show that Holocaust education effectively teaches students about antisemitism, bigotry, and the consequences of indifference. This legislation could not be more timely, as antisemitic incidents are higher than they’ve been in almost 20 years: 2017 showed a 60% increase in antisemitic events, a staggering 32% increase in hate crimes in Washington State, and K-12 schools have been reporting disturbing increases in hate-based incidents. At the Holocaust Center for Humanity, we use Holocaust education as a powerful tool to dismantle hate and inspire action, and we know that SB5612 will aid us in carrying out our mission and reaching even more students across Washington State.

The Reflector | April 18, 2022 | By Sebastian Rubino 

Peter Metzelaar, a Holocaust survivor from Amsterdam, shared his story with students at Battle Ground High School during a presentation he gave on April 14.

Metzelaar, who is 86, was born in Amsterdam in 1935. In 1942, when he was 7 years old, the Nazis seized members of his family, who were Jewish. Metzelaar and his mother, Elli, found shelter on a small farm in Mekkinga in northern Holland with the help of Klaas and Roefina Post.

They later moved from place to place in hiding until the war ended in 1945. 

“In Holland, it was a very small country, and at that particular time, there were only about 140,000 people of the Jewish faith,” said Metzelaar. “The Nazis took over in May of 1940. By the time it was over in May 1945, of the 140,000 (people), between 75 to 80% were murdered. I don’t even like to use the word killed. They were murdered intentionally.”

Read the entire article

 

Stroum Center for Jewish Studies | June 13, 2019

The Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, in collaboration with Seattle’s Holocaust Center for Humanity, is proud to announce the 2019 winner of the Excellence in Scholarship Holocaust paper prize, awarded every year for an outstanding undergraduate paper related to Holocaust studies.

Jacqueline Goodrich, a history major who will graduate in 2020, received this year’s prize for her paper “Photography ver sus Storytelling in the Realm of Historical Study,” which analyzes the ethics of depicting atrocities like the Holocaust through depersonalized photographs of suffering, as opposed to individual portraits and personal narratives.

Writes the selection committee, “We were impressed by the theoretical sophistication and historical sensitivity displayed in this paper. Meditating on the strengths and pitfalls of photography as a catalyst for the formation of historical memory about the Holocaust, the author argues that storytelling is a crucial supplement to photography, because photographs, taken by themselves, often fail to ‘foster a connection between the past and the present’ and can even numb us to the suffering of the victims.

“Examining the work of Seattle-based artist Miha Sarani, as well as Art Spiegelman’s well-known graphic novel Maus, the author shows how less ‘realistic’ representations of atrocity can paradoxically be more effective in conveying the reality of those horrors to contemporary audiences through their narrative power.”

Goodrich concludes her paper by contrasting the anonymous suffering depicted in “atrocity photography” with the genuine sense of connection and loss that individual stories can inspire, reflecting:

"If people of the present can relate to and understand the humanity of just one of the victims in the past, they have come one step closer to ensuring that such horrors will not be repeated. As the generation who have directly experienced the horrors of World War II fades away, it is even more critical to record these stories as the best link historians have available to connect with and understand the past."

As well as majoring in history , Jacqueline Goodrich hopes to minor in Jewish studies, and plans to write her senior thesis on Holocaust history. After graduating in 2020, Goodrich intends to attend medical school and to pursue a career as a physician.

The Holocaust paper prize is made possible through the generosity of Stroum Center for Jewish Studies donors and the Holocaust Center for Humanity. Special thanks to Dee Simon, Baral Family Executive Director of the Holocaust Center for Humanity, for her work in helping to make the prize possible.

King 5 News | April 27, 2022 

EDMONDS, Wash. — A new exhibition at Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds showcases the work of holocaust survivor and artist Maria Frank Abrams.

She had a celebrated career including an array of group and solo shows. But like all the artists featured at Cascadia, Abrams’ work eventually disappeared from the mainstream art world.

The museum focuses on neglected or forgotten artists whose work spans the years 1860-1970. Many of them are women and people of color.

"Maria Frank Abrams is a great example of what we do here,” said Sally Ralston, Executive Director of Cascadia. "We are honored to showcase these artists again and bring their art here, and give them the respect their art deserves."

Read the entire article

Jewish in Seattle | June 12, 2019 | By Claire Butwinick

IT’S NOT EVERY DAY THAT A HIGH SCHOOLER gets invited to the state capital, but Mario Falit-Baiamonte is not your everyday high schooler. On April 19th, the 16-year-old watched Gov. Jay Inslee sign Senate Bill 5612, which will encourage Holocaust education in public schools across the state. The teen spent months supporting the bill and even testified in front of the legislature. Now, his hard work is paying off. “[It] just feels so good when these bills get passed,” he says. “What really keeps me going and doing all of this work is when I can see that what I’ve done has some kind of effect. That just feels really good.”

Ever since he took an eye-opening middle school course on genocide at Licton Springs K-8 School, Falit-Ba iamonte has turned his passion for Holocaust education into action. For the past four years, he’s been on the Holocaust Center for Humanity’s Student Leadership Board serving as an ambassador and spreading the word about Holocaust remembrance. He says that with the rise of hate speech and the dwindling number of survivors, we need to educate about the Holocaust more than ever.

Falit-Baiamonte’s contagious excitement for social justice also stretches into his role in student gover nment at Seattle’s Nathan Hale High School. Last year, he helped organize his school’s walkout to prevent gun violence and spoke at the rally afterward at the University of Washington. This spring, he also facilitated a school-wide walkout about climate change.

Falit-Baiamonte already has years of public service under his belt, but his journey is just getting started. Earlier this year, the teen announced his plan to run for mayor in 2021. While he’s not expecting to win, the potential candidate is excited to bring a youthful voice to the ballot. “I think that when young people come to the table and talk about issues they care about, that can change the narrative for the better,” he says. “And that’s what I would be trying to accomplish by running for mayor.”

Age 16

School Nathan Hale

Role Model Late Holocaust survivor Steve Adler

Fox2Now (Missouri) | August 23, 2021 | By Emily Manley

Lawmakers continue probe of critical race theory in Missouri schools despite results of district survey

(Excerpt) Dee Simon, Executive Director of the Holocaust Center for Humanity told lawmakers she’s concerned by banning CRT, students wouldn’t learn about certain parts of the Holocaust.

“To teach the Holocaust, educators need resources, and they need to understand why they are teaching the Holocaust,” Simon said. “I am a firm believer that if the Holocaust isn’t taught well, it’s better not to teach it at all because it could actually support anti-Semitism.”

Read the full article

Kent Reporter | May 30, 2019

Two Meeker Middle School eighth-graders won prizes in the Holocaust Center for Humanity’s 2019 Writing, Art, & Film Contest.

Rumela Weldeyesus tied for first place and Leyna Nguyen was third in the middle-school art category.

Taking inspiration from the stories of local Holocaust survivors, students throughout the Pacific Northwest used their creativity to honor these individuals through art, film, and writing.

Contest winners will be honored in a community awards ceremony at 4 p.m. Sunday, June 2 at the Henry and Sandra Friedman Holocaust Center for Humanity, 2045 2nd Ave., Seattle.

This year, hundreds of students from more than 60 schools enter ed the contest.

“When the entries pour in from students around the state, from rural and urban public schools, parochial schools, students who are homeschooled – really all over – we see that students strive and genuinely intend to improve our world. It’s very inspiring, and tells us that our work at the center is as important today as it’s ever been,” said Ilana Cone Kennedy, director of education for the center.

The full list of winners and their work can be viewed at holocaustcenterseattle.org.

The Seattle Times | June 30, 2021 | By Jim Brunner

A Washington state lawmaker critical of COVID-19 vaccine mandates wore a yellow Star of David at a speech over the weekend — a symbol the Nazis forced Jews to wear during the Holocaust.

State Rep. Jim Walsh, R-Aberdeen, had the star affixed to his pink shirt during a speech to conservative activists at a Lacey church basketball gym on Saturday.

“It’s an echo from history,” Walsh wrote on a Facebook page where a video of the event was posted. “In the current context, we’re all Jews.”

The misappropriation of the infamous star symbol — used to identify Jews first for exclusion, and then for extermination — was criticized as deeply offensive by a local Holocaust education leader.

“Our government is making an effort to protect their own citizens, not kill them,” said Dee Simon, Baral Family executive director of the Seattle-based Holocaust Center for Humanity, which works to teach people about Nazi Germany’s murder of 6 million Jews during World War II. “It not only trivializes it, it distorts history.”

In an interview Tuesday, Walsh said he had been given the star by someone at the event, where most attendees were wearing one. He described some of the organizers as “deeply concerned about vaccine passports and vaccine segregation.”

Read the rest of the story

Jewish in Seattle Magazine | April 15, 2019 | By Gregory Gutterman Scruggs

Click here to read the full story

In March, a photo surfaced of two Mercer Island High School students giving a Nazi salute. Shortly before that, in January, Eastside residents found anti-immigrant flyers packaged with Snickers bars directing them to bloodandsoil.org, a web address for hate group Patriot Front. And just prior to that, in November, a West Seattle family awoke to the message “F--- JEW THIEVES” on the sidewalk and “JEW” spray-painted on their house.

Despite our region’s reputation as an inclusive, tolerant community, anti-Semitism is a prejudice with long roots in the Pacific Northwest,and it is resurging in this place we call home. But from Jewish groups to law enforcement, the community is not standing idly by as accounts of swastika graffiti, Holocaust denial, and Jewish conspiracy theories swell.

Anti-Semitic bias incidents, such as vandalism, assault, and harassment, are indisputably on the rise nationally. According to the Anti-Defamation League, from 2016 to 2017 such incidents increased by 57 percent, and in K–12 schools the increase was 94 percent. Locally, the FBI’s hate crime index also demonstrates an uptick. Since the agency began tracking hate crimes by state in 1992, incidents tagged “anti-Jewish” in Washington have ranged from a low of 6 to a high of 25. In 2017, the number hit an all-time high of 43 — up from 19 the year before, the highest since 1993.

[...]

Dee Simon, Baral Family Executive Director of the Holocaust Center for Humanity, fields plenty of inquiries from concerned educators after they discover a swastika scrawled on a locker or find out that a Jewish student was told to “go back to Israel.”

“More often than not, teachers tell us the students don’t know what they’re saying,” she says. “It doesn’t come from deep-seated anti-Semitism, it comes from ignorance.” Simon adds that online searches can lead students to conspiracy theories and misinformation, like searches for “Rothschild” that point to conspiracy theories about Jewish financiers, not reputable sources on the European banking family.

The center provides a cutting-edge curriculum that uses the example of the Holocaust as a lesson about halting all forms of bigotry. It also offers school tours of its exhibit, a combined effort that has reached roughly one-quarter of Washington students en route to a goal that every child in the state receive some measure of Holocaust education. New this year, the center has a 10-unit flexible curriculum specifically geared toward Jewish educational settings like day schools and synagogue youth programs.

Local incidents plus the attack in Pittsburgh spurred her organization to become even more proactive. The center launched a free class for adults, “Confronting Anti-Semitism and Intolerance,” with the ADL that will be offered at least 15 times in 2019. The interactive three-hour session includes a museum tour to emphasize how Nazi-era anti-Semitic propaganda fueled the Holocaust, then moves to contemporary forms of anti-Semitism that are more subtle than the Nuremberg laws of the 1930s.

For example, the course explains anti-Semitic dog whistles, or code words, like “globalist” and the online communication use of triple parentheses, also known as the echo effect, to indicate that someone is Jewish. It also explores how to distinguish criticism of Israeli policy from anti-Semitism, a debate that raged in Congress over comments made by Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Oma r in March.

The class concludes with a model called the Pyramid of Hate, which articulates how small but widespread acts of discrimination at the bottom of the pyramid can eventually escalate to the top of the pyramid, where a genocide like the Holocaust occurs.

“What is our role as average citizens to tear down that bottom level of the Pyramid of Hate?” Simon asks. “The Holocaust is a well-documented case of what can happen if you don’t pay attention and don’t watch the little things.”

Friday, March 19, 2021
 

The Holocaust Center for Humanity is shocked and saddened by the recent murders in Atlanta that took the lives of eight people, including six Asian women. We grieve with the families and friends of the victims and the broader community.

While the motive for these murders is not yet known, they were committed at a time of increasing violent attacks on Asian American and Pacific Islanders and are rooted in racism and xenophobia. 

The Holocaust Center stands in unity with the Asian and Pacific Islander communities and all people who are targeted with identity based violence. We remain dedicated to empowering individuals to learn from the past, fight for human dignity, and take action.

As a member of the Jewish Community Relations Council, we stand in solidarity. 

Click here to read more.

King5 | May 2, 2019 | By Drew Mikkelsen

Click here to view the video

83-year-old Peter Metzelaar tells his story with the hope that what happened to him will never happen again.

The Holocaust survivor usuall y speaks to students. But earlier this year, he testified before lawmakers, encouraging them to pass a bill that “strongly encourages” schools to include lessons on the Holocaust in middle and high schools.

Governor Jay Inslee signed the bill into law in April.

Under the new law, the Holocaust could be made a mandatory part of school curriculum by 2022.

Born in Amsterdam in 1935, Metzelaar lost his father, aunt, uncle and grandparents in World War II after they were all arrested by the Nazis and murdered in the gas chambers of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Metzelaar and his mother escaped the Nazis by hiding at a rural Dutch farm for two years.

Representing the Holocaust Center for Humanity, Metzelaar tells his story to students in middle and high schools around the country.

“I was there,” Metzelaar told 8th graders at Bremerton’s Mountain View Middle School on Wednesday .

He explained how students, the same age as the 8th graders, were systematically rounded up and murdered by the Nazis.

During a speech that brought some students to tears, he called Auschwitz the “most inhumane piece of hell that man ever created for man.”

Metzelaar hopes his presentation will teach the students that differences should be overcome with tolerance, not violence.

He said it’s a message that is still important.

“You can truly say that it (Holocaust) had to with Germany and the Jewish people,” said Metzelaar. “But you can almost go beyond that in today's setting… what mankind is capable of doing to mankind.”

The Mercer Island Reporter | March 4, 2021 | By Andy Nystrom

Mercer Island High School students connected with Holocaust survivors through the Holocaust Center for Humanity and other national Holocaust groups. "(These students) took their passion of creating a better and schoolwide understanding of the Holocaust to build student empathy and were able to create a schoolwide opportunity for students to speak directly with survivors of the Holocaust," said MIHS Principal Walter Kelly.

Read the full article

The Clipper | April 17, 2019 | By Heather Stribling

EvCC’s Humanities Alliance welcomed guest speaker and author, Karen Treiger, from the Holocaust Center for Humanity, on April 17.

Treiger was a Seattle attorney for 18 years before ultimately leaving her practice to write the story of her in-laws, who were both Holocaust survivors.

“I was very concerned their story would die with them,” said Treiger. She said it was in danger of becoming like a game of telephone. She knew exactly what would happen to the stories if they weren’t preserved, and said it would only get worse as the generations “went on.”

With her youngest child leaving for college, and an empty nest in sight, she saw her chance to help the story survive. She thought, “If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this now.”

So, Treiger set out on a journey of discovery and spent three years researching the story of Sam and Esther Goldberg. Her efforts culminated in her book, “My Soul is Filled with Joy: A Holocaust Story,” published in 2018.

In her speech on Wednesday, titled, “Sam & Esther: Escape, Rescue & Resilience,” she took the audience on a journey with the young Goldbergs through Nazi-invaded Poland, death camps and hiding places including a forest, a pit and an orchard with a “family of righteous gentiles.”

Sam and Esther’s story played out like a riveting movie, reminding the audience of the horrors endured by so many millions, and the kindness and bravery of those willing to risk everything to protect them.

The Goldbergs’ individual survival stories were filled with incredible feats of daring escape and near-misses. Sam was one of only 65 Jews to escape the death camp, Treblinka, where 870,000 people were murdered. Esther’s entire family was killed by the Einsatzgruppen, a Nazi death squad, in their hometown while she was in the hospital with typhus.

The Goldbergs met in a forest shortly after Sam’s escape from Treblinka, and were assisted by a Polish family who had been previously helping Esther. Treiger says Esther had “used her golden tongue” to talk the family into hiding them both.

In 2016, Treiger was able to visit the small town and forest in Poland where Sam and Esther had hidden for nearly a year. She saw, firsthand, the forest where they met and the remnants of the pit they had dug for hiding.

Through the course of her research, Treiger was able to track down the three surviving grandchildren of the original families who helped to hide her in-laws. During her visit to Poland, she met with one of the grandsons and shared with him the story of how his grandparents had helped save Sam and Esther’s lives. The grandson replied (in Polis h), “My soul is filled with joy,” and thus the name of her manuscript was born.

After the Soviets freed the town where Sam and Esther were hiding, the Goldbergs were able to go to a Displaced Persons Camp (DP camp) in postwar, American-occupied Munich.

From there, they waited four years for visas to America and would eventually arrive in New York Harbor in 1949. Treiger said, “They came with no English, they came penniless, and they came traumatized. It’s not so different from refugees coming to our shores today, who come with those three adjectives as well.”

Treiger concluded with a call to action. “We all have to be part of the solution to this horror that happens over and over throughout history. We have to be a part of the change.”

The Humanities Alliance and the Holocaust Center for Humanity will welcome three more speakers this spring, on select Wednesdays from 12:20-1:20. For more information and details on future Holocaust Survivor forums, visit https://www.everettcc.edu/programs/communications/humanities/holocaust-survivor-forums

The Seattle Times | January 21, 2021 | By Nina Shapiro

Dee Simon, executive director of the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle, also applauded Biden’s call for unity, as well as what she called his focus on personal responsibility. She repeated the words Biden used, as he quoted President Lincoln: “My whole soul is in this.”

“It was exactly what we needed to hear,” she said, and a lesson from the Holocaust . “Each person could have made a difference,” and many did, including those who risked their lives to rescue Jewish people and others targeted by the Nazis.

Read the full article

Voice of the Valley | March 18, 2019 | By Tahoma Matters

Maple View Middle School eighth-graders have studied the Holocaust this year and now they have heard a first-hand account from one of its survivors.

Peter Metzelaar, a speaker with the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle, spoke to Maple View’s 340 eighth-grade students last week, as they gathered in the auxiliary gym. He shared about how he and his mother were able to hide for more than two years on a farm and later escaped the Nazis with the help of an officer from Adolf Hitler’s forces.

“It’s something that I survived and I lived through,” Metzelaar said. He began by sharing Webster’s definition of Holocaust: The total destruction of people by fire. Metzelaar also gave several examples to try to help the students envision what it means to say that 6 million people were murdered by Hitler. By percentage, he pointed out that only about 34 of the students in the crowd would have survived. Or, take the tragedy of 9/11, when 3,000 people died — and multiply that number by 2,000. The number of Jewish people murdered was nearly as many as the total population of the state of Washington (about 7 million people), Metzelaar explained.

He shared with the students about the Nuremberg Laws, and the invasion of Holland, where he and his family lived. As a child of only 7, Metzelaar didn’t understand what was happening when people from his neighborhood began being taken away by German soldiers.

“Nobody knew — where were these people taken, and for what purpose?” he recalled, trying to convey the terror and confusion that he felt when the Nazis pulled up in front of his family’s apartment complex in the middle of the night. Soldiers were yelling, doors slamming and babies crying. The next day, several of his friends were not in school, he said. Soon after that, his aunt and uncle were taken away, and not long after, his grandmother and grandfather.

One day in June of 1942, Metzelaar’s mother, Elli, sat him down. She cried as she explained that his father had been arrested. “That’s the last we ever saw or heard of him again,” he said.

Somehow Elli Metzelaar was able to get in touch with the Dutch Underground, a network of people who helped save the lives of Jewish people. The mother and son were offered a place to live and hide with Klaas and Roelfina (pronounced Klaus and Roefina) Post, who owned a small farm in Holland.

“They were so, so, so courageous,” Metzelaar said, recalling how hard the Post family worked and how kindly they treated him and his mother. The Germans began searching for Jewish people who were in hiding, and the raids grew more and more frequent. Early on, the pair would hide under the floorboards in a hole that Klaas created and covered with a rug to mask the location. The searchers walked directly over their heads, Metzelaar said. “All it would have taken was one cough, one sneeze, one hiccup, and it would have been all over.”

Later Metzelaar and Klaas worked to dig out a cave in a nearby wooded area and disguise it with branches so that the pair could hide there, instead, for the raids, which lasted up to 90 minutes.

“I was always afraid this was going to cave in,” he said, recalling that at age 8 he knew and understood that there were people who wanted to kill him. He still wondered: Where were his father, grandfather, grandmother — and what would happen to his mother?

After being with the Post family for more than two years, Elli Metzelaar became worried that they would be caught and killed for sheltering her and Peter. She reached out to the Dutch Underground for a new hiding place, and they moved to an apartment in the city with two women. Living there, the two were frequently hungry, and Elli found out that the women planned to turn them over to the Nazis. So, she asked the underground for a third placement. Then, she sewed a nurse’s uniform and sneaked Peter out of the apartment in the middle of the night. The only way to get to their new hiding place was on a highway that was reserved for the German military. With incredible bravery, Elli signaled for a ride. She had told Peter to stay quiet, and when an SS (Schutzstaffel, or Hitler’s elite force) officer stopped his truck, Elli convinced him that she worked for the International Red Cross and was assigned to transport an orphan.

“He put us in the truck, and they took us to Amsterdam,” Metzelaar exclaimed. “How did she come up with that plan? The enemy took us to Amsterdam — I get excited every time I tell that part.”

In May of 1945, Canadian forces liberated Holland. Peter Metzelaar was 10 years old.

“The war was over. No one in my family returned,” Metzelaar said. He and his mother moved to New York when he was 13. Fifty years later with his family, he returned to Europe, and they traveled to Poland. “Twenty minutes outside Krakow was the largest piece of hell ever created, Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp.” Metzelaar told the students some of what went on at the concentration camp, where crematoriums would burn 24 hours a day, and as many as 4,000 people were murdered in one day.

He shared a bit about propaganda and how the Nazis used it.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” Metzelaar said. He encouraged the students to continue learning, and to use critical thinking skills. “Be tolerant. Not everybody prays the same. Not everybody looks the same.”

On the same family trip, the Metzelaars traveled to Holland and tried to find the Post family to thank them. Although the couple had died, Peter Metzelaar was able to find the farmhouse and the cave where he and his mother hid — and survived.

The Seattle Times | August 30, 2020 | By Nicole Brodeur

Dee Simon, the Baral family executive director of the Holocaust Center for Humanity, said some survivors build walls around their past; remembering and speaking about it is too hard. “It’s the people who speak out who are truly heroes,” she said of survivors like Henry Friedman. “Every time they spoke, it was painful for them .”

Red the full article

ParentMap | March 8, 2019 | By Natalie Singer-Velush

It can be hard for an adult to access history, even as we generally understand the importance of the past in contextualizing the present and shaping the future. It can be doubly hard for a child to relate to the past, and to the facts and events that seem as removed from their modern-day reality — school, friends and Minecraft — as life on another planet.

I talk to my children about history all the time because I believe it’s the only way to map our collective successes and failures as humans — and to improve. Sometimes my tween and young teen listen; other times I can tell they are thinking, "How does this even relate to me at all? What is she even talking about? I’m busy trying to decide what to do about this Minecraft mob. Blah blah blah."

The power of storytelling
We know that a key way to communicate difficult subjects and to connect emotionally to them is through story, and luckily for parents and educators in the Puget Sound region, Seattle’s Holocaust Center for Humanity has a unique understanding of how to teach history, and consequently, empathy, through storytelling.

My family and I went for a visit to the Center's interactive new exhibit, “Finding Light in the Darkness.”

Touring the exhibit, we encountered a variety of easily detachable cards — hanging on the walls at kid level. Visitors can grab and read these at any time.

On side one of a card we read:

1939, May 27–28, Saturday–Sunday

Straits of Florida

77 degrees F, calm at 10 knots

The ocean liner St. Louis is turned away from both Havana, Cuba, and Miami, Florida. Over 900 European Jewish refugees on board are instead forced back to Europe. Most did not survive the Holocaust.

And on the second side of the card:

On this day…

In Seattle: The biggest local news involves the Prince and Princess of Norway, who end their tour of the Northwest by visiting a memorial to Norwegian immigrants.

Local survivor: Joe Lewinsohn: In May 1939, Joe and his family escape Berlin for Shanghai, China, where they joined over 17,000 other Jewish refugees in what eventually became known as the Shanghai or Hongkew Ghetto.

In just over 100 words, which is about what my teen daughter consumes in five minutes of scrolling on Instagram, a child in 2019 can instantly connect what happened across the globe 80 years ago. Kids also connect this moment in history with headlines they have seen on modern-day refugee crises, with the Pacific Northwest history they might be more familiar with and with their natural sense of justice. And don’t we all know how strong our kids’ sense of justice is? There’s nothing more intense than a kid who has been the victim of or witness to an act of unfairness.

Justice and hope
That sense of justice and the human desire for hope are at the center of the new exhibit.

Instead of being bombarded with grim war facts, visitors to the center are invited to hear, see and touch artifacts that represent stories of hope and survival. The carefully curated and thoughtful exhibit shines a spotlight on local survivors, such as Thomas Blatt, who visitors learn was 16 years old when his family was deported by Nazis to the death camp Sobibor. His family was killed upon arrival but Thomas was put to labor. On Oct. 14, 1943, the prisoners in Sobibor, including Thomas, staged a revolt; Thomas was one of the few who survived, and he eventually came to live in Seattle.

Holocaust-Center-for-Humanity-Anne-Frank-tree
Credit: Natalie Singer-Velush
The exhibit’s layered stories open windows into the experiences of children caught up in the war through short pamphlets, childhood photographs and connected objects that hold meaning and convey emotion. When kids touring the center see a tin food bowl preser ved behind plexiglass they can learn that food bowls were of critical importance to prisoners — without a bowl, one would starve to death. When they “meet” the young hero Thomas Blatt, they discover that when he learned he would be part of a prisoner revolt, he carefully buried his own food bowl in the camp.

During our tour, my daughters connected most to the powerful theme of bullying, surfaced in myriad ways throughout the exhibit. The stories encourage visitors to think about what it means to be complicit to injustice, either directly or indirectly, and to broaden our understanding of what bullying is and how we can all be upstanders in the face of it. It’s a message that feels particularly important right now with U.S. and world events as they are.

Moral courage
For decades now, social and behavioral scientists have studied the Holocaust to try to understand what it is that compels humans to be cruel to their fellow humans, and why some of us stand by while few others intervene. It was in the testimonies of those few people who did intervene, risking their own lives to save victims during the Holocaust, that an answer emerged.

“They were driven by what you call moral courage,” Dee Simon, the center’s executive director and daughter of a survivor featured in the exhibit, told me.

“Finding Light In the Darkness” shows our children what moral courage looks like and why they are the carriers of hope for our current and future generations. This formidable exhibit will inspire visitors to apply their sense of justice to modern-day crises — big and small — and in doing so make the world a better place.

The Seattle Times | December 1, 2019 | By Nina Shapiro

Dee Simon, the Baral family executive directorof the Holocaust Center for Humanity is trying to get to as many of the estimated 150 remaining survivors in Washington as possible, as well as to veter ans who liberated the camps, to take their testimony for the center’s online repository. Many have never told their story before, Simon said.

Read the full article

KIRO 7 | February 6, 2019 | By Patranya Bhoolsuwan

A new exhibit opened for the public Wednesday at the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle.

It's called "Finding Light in the Darkness," and it's a historical walk through time to inspire visitors to speak out against hate.

The exhibit features stories of the Holocaust survivors who call Washington state home, including that of 88-year-old Steve Adler.

“I believe very strongly this is the most hopeful place in the city,” said Adler, who was born in Germany in 1930.

12 members of his family, including his paternal grandparents, were killed in concentration camps during World War II.

He said the lesson he wants people to take away from the exhibit is to embrace the differences in others.

“Our society has to be open to people who are not quite like us,” said Adler. “Whether it be ethnic, religious, I don’t care. It doesn’t make a difference.”

The story of Ingrid Kanis Steppic’s family was also featured at this new exhibit. Her family was part of the Dutch Resistance who helped shelter Jews during in the period of Nazi Germany.

“The more details you know about how it came about, the more you can try to prevent that,” said Steppic, who also volunteers as a docent at the Holocaust Center.

The Center ’s Baral Family Executive Director, Dee Simon, said the stories and lessons behind this exhibit are still relevant today.

“Hate crimes are rising all over the country,” said Simon. “It’s through the lens of the Holocaust that we can examine situations that occur in the past and those we see today.”

The Holocaust Museum is open to the public Sundays and Wednesdays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The Seattle Times | January 20, 2021 | By Nicole Brodeur

Dee Simon, the Baral family executive director of the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle: “If anything, the Nuremberg trials gave us hope, because of the way they showed how civil society will find its way after it falls,” she said. “The trajectory always get s us a little bit better. There is the other side of it, where things are so much better now.”

Read the full article

ParentMap | January 29, 2019 | By Patty Lindley

Nathan Hale High School sophomore Mario Falit-Baiamonte is half Jewish, but growing up, he didn’t know much about the Holocaust; it wasn’t really discussed all that often in his family, he says. But that changed in the seventh grade when he took a Holocaust studies class at Licton Springs K–8 School in North Seattle. As part of the class, his history teacher took the students on a field trip to tour the Holocaust Center for Humanity.

“I am having trouble remembering what exactly I knew about the Holocaust before then and what I didn’t, but if I knew anything, it wasn’t much, and I was really interested by the whole thing,” he says.

A couple of weeks after the tour, Falit-Baiamonte learned that the center was starting a student leadership board, and his teacher encouraged him to apply. He was selected to join the inaugural board and remains an active member. Ilana Cone Kennedy, director of education at the Holocaust Center for Humanity, recalls, “Mario was full of passion and eager to ask questions and learn more. He is now in his fourth year on our board, and it has been incredible to see him channel this same passion into social justice issues both in and out of school.”

Falit-Baiamonte’s middle school experience of studying the historical lessons of the Holocaust and tracing its intergenerational impact and relevance to what is going on in the world today is perhaps a rarer exposure to the subject matter than many parents might imagine. Young Americans are disturbingly ignorant about the Holocaust because a majority of schools aren’t teaching them about it. “At my school, there’s no Holocaust education even included in the history department. The only thing is in the language arts department in ninth-grade year, when you read the book ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel. … I guess I do think that I had a bit of a unique experience getting that course, and that’s what got me involved [at the Holocaust Center for Humanity],” says Falit-Baiamonte.

Through its education programs and community events, the Holocaust Center for Humanity is dedicated to its mission to ensure that as many classrooms as possible across the state can receive high-quality Holocaust education. In his capacity as a member of its student leadership board, Falit-Baiamonte is one of about 20 members who operate as youth ambassadors and advisers for the center, help ing to plan and support its projects, events and initiatives. The 16-year-old is enthusiastic about getting to play a part in bringing awareness about the realities of the Holocaust to his school and the wider community. He fervently believes that Holocaust education has a potent and essential application in teaching today’s students about the degree to which unchecked bigotry, intolerance and indifference in our schools and communities could potentially escalate. “Obviously, it’s the Holocaust Center, but we also spend a lot of time talking about other genocides and horrible atrocities that go on nowadays,” he says.

Falit-Baiamonte traces his interest in social justice issues and politics back to age 6 when he watched the inauguration of President Barack Obama, and he has been actively involved in student government since middle school. Last year, he played a key role in organizing his Nathan Hale classmates to join the nationwide student walkout protesting gun violence in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting. He had the distinction of introducing Mayor Jenny Durkan at the culminating rally that converged on the University of Washington’s Red Square that day.

Falit-Baiamonte’s avid dedication to school politics prompts me to ask him an annoying-adult question: Do you see a career in politics in your future? He charms me with his answer. “Definitely. I think it’s the best way for me to make a difference, and … I think it is important to get your message out early, even if you can’t win at the beginning.” What does he mean by this? Well, he started a crowdfunding page last year to raise money for his potential campaign in the 2021 Seattle mayoral race — not necessarily with the intention of winning, he says, but “with the intention of getting a good message out and trying to bring some change.”

Editor's note: This article was sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.