Never say that we have reached the end of the road
Perth’s School of Education is to host a free professional learning seminar particularly for HASS and History Teachers who especially, have to confront teaching the Holocaust to students in Years 10 and 11.
Eli Rabinowitz and Chief Rabbi Mirvis
As the stories from actual survivors dwindle as their numbers decline, we have to look for alternative resources to help with this difficult topic.
Eli Rabinowitz, founder of WE ARE HERE! Project for Upstanders has uncovered “Zog Nit Keynmol” (“Never say that we have reached the end of the road”), a poem written by 22-year-old Partisan Hirsch Glik in the Vilna ghetto in 1943, and set to music by Soviet composer Dmitry Pokrass. It became known as “The Partisans’ Song”, the anthem of Jewish partisans resisting German forces in WW2. Glik was killed in Estonia in 1944.
Paul Robeson, the African-American singer, defiantly sang the song in a broadcast across the USSR in 1949 to show his solidarity with the oppressed Jewish intellectuals of the Soviet Union.
This song resonates with the activities of human rights groups such as Courage to Care, and to oppressed or marginalised minority groups, most recently Indigenous Australians. The WE ARE HERE! Project has incorporated the figure of William Cooper, a Yorta Yorta man who took a petition to the German Consulate in Melbourne in 1938 to protest against the events of Kristallnacht.
Using the stories of the partisans in the forests during World War 2, WE ARE HERE! empowers young people to take steps to confront and combat acts of discriminatory prejudice and injustice with their voices and their actions.
The seminar will be facilitated by Nance Adler, a highly experienced educator from the U.S. Nance is a Museum Teachers Fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and a Powell Fellow at the Holocaust Centre for Humanity in Seattle.
This professional learning seminar will also feature the short film “Ties That Bind” – a conversation between Aboriginal ‘upstander’ William Cooper’s grandson Uncle Boydie and a Holocaust survivor. Attendees will be provided with a lesson plan and other resources to incorporate WE ARE HERE! into their classroom activities.
Event details
Date: Sunday, 4 August 2019
Time: Registrations and afternoon tea from 3.30pm. Seminar from 4pm to 5pm
Venue: Perth’s Edith Cowan University (ECU) School of EducationECU Mount Lawley Campus 2 Bradford Road, Mount Lawley Building 17, Room, 17.157
Cost: FREE! All teachers are welcome to attend
Registration: Register online via Eventbrite.
