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Australia and New Zealand have been included as a separate section for several reasons. First, each was a British settler society, and they both still deal with the legacy of the British subjugation of an indigenous people. As we will see, this history has implications with regard to the memory of the Holocaust. Second, each society limited immigration of non-whites for much of its history in order to maintain racial purity on each respective island. For the most part, this restriction applied to Jews, and there is a strain of guilt in each society for turning away Jewish refugees during the war. Finally, each country, in spite of immigration quotas, did absorb Holocaust survivors, and the Holocaust has become part of popular memory.
Further, a history of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators immigrating to the region, especially to AUSTRALIA, has led to a degree of popular awareness of the event, particularly after the international notoriety of the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1960. In 1933, there was already a small Jewish community of 23,000 in Australia, and over 15,000 immigrated to the country before the end of World War II. read more
Still, the Australian government refused to raise its strict quota of 5,000 immigrants a year during the war, and the state’s representative to the 1938 Evian Conference (an international conference devoted to solving the problem of Jewish refugees in Europe) offered perhaps the most well-known single encapsulation of the outside world’s reluctance to assist Hitler’s victims during the war: “As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration.” Jewish refugees continued to come to Australia, however, within the confines of the immigration quotas, and by 1961, the number of Jews in Australia had increased from 23,000 in 1933 to 60,000 in 1961. Most of that increase was comprised of Holocaust survivors. Thus, in the words of Suzanne Rutland, “Australian Jewry is largely a post-Holocaust community … . Melbourne has a larger percentage of Holocaust survivors than any other place [in Australia]; worldwide, only Israel has a larger percentage.” The Holocaust has also become an important topic in recent years, as immigrant Muslim communities have exhibited a large degree of intolerance toward Jews and skepticism toward learning about the Holocaust.
There is some degree of knowledge about the Holocaust in Australia. David Ritter has argued that in spite of Jewish refugee immigration to the island continent during the war, public consciousness of the Holocaust did not really exist until “the [Adolf] Eichmann hearing created an interpretive threshold after which, for the first time in Australia, the extermination of the Jews began to be understood as a phenomenon apart, known as the ‘Holocaust.’” The Eichmann trial, indeed, was one of the most important Australian news stories of 1961 and galvanized a significant discussion of the Holocaust there. Still, as Suzanne Rutland has shown, among the Jewish population of Australia, it was not until the 1970s that a substantial interest in education around the history of the Holocaust developed. Jewish day schools there—such as Moriah College, which was begun by Jewish refugees in 1942—placed a growing emphasis on teaching about the Holocaust once the second generation of immigrants came of age and began teaching.
In 1984, the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne was established under the patronage of Yad Vashem. The museum’s education program, which has served some 400,000 Australian students since opening, provides a historical introduction to the Holocaust, a documentary video, and features its own survivor testimony program. The museum display focuses in particular on the Australian perspective on the Holocaust—commemorating European Jews’ attempts to get entry visas as well as Aboriginal protests of Nazi policies.
The Sydney Jewish Museum opened in 1992 and has worked closely with Australian teachers to bring the Holocaust into schools. Australia’s government is a federation, and the optional federal curriculum does include the Holocaust. The state of New South Wales (NSW), which includes Sydney (the country’s most populous city), does not mandate Holocaust education, but it does mandate that students learn “respect for the cultural diversity of Australian society” in fostering their “intellectual, social, and moral development.” The Holocaust is included as one optional case study in this curriculum.
The Sydney Jewish Museum works closely with the NSW Board of Studies to train teachers to use the Holocaust within the framework of the existing curriculum. First, the museum runs two teacher training programs, and the NSW Institute of Teachers has accredited the programs so that teachers receive professional development credit for attendance. Second, the museum partners with Yad Vashem in the Gandel Holocaust Studies Program for Australian Educators. Teachers throughout Australia are eligible, and the roughly two dozen who are funded each year take a “pre-seminar” at the Sydney Jewish Museum before a ten-day intensive course at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies. Finally, the museum has published Australia’s premier Holocaust curriculum—Teaching the Holocaust—for Jewish teachers and its own training program.
The curricular source book, written by Sophie Gelski and originally published in 2003, has an interdisciplinary scope, appropriate for English, Geography, History, Religious Education, Society and Culture, and Visual Arts. The material attempts to link the Holocaust to Australian history, noting the state’s “cold and unwelcome” attitudes toward Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Europe while also pointing out the large proportion of Holocaust survivors in Australia. Notable units in the text focus on multiculturalism, Holocaust poetry, Australia’s response at the Evian conference and connections to contemporary refugee crises, and the “choices” of different individuals in the Holocaust (i.e., perpetrator, resister, etc.). One version is geared toward students in the final years in Australian secondary school, while another, for years six to nine, is devoted to younger teenagers.
Courage to Care, a program created and funded by B’nai B’rith, has, since 1998, offered “student-centred” programs, which use the Holocaust as the central case study, in New South Wales and neighboring Victoria. Courage to Care “focuses on the rescuers—those who had the ‘courage to care’ and who risked their lives to save victims of the Nazis”—in order to instill in students their own agency in combating racism and intolerance in the world. The program targets several communities each year. In its first eight years, Courage to Care reached 150,000 participants, 55,000 of whom were school children.
RESOURCES
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON HOLOCAUST EDUCATION: Trends, Patterns, and Practices, a publication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Salzburg Global Seminar, 2013
Download PDF
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM Holocaust Encyclopedia Articles
LINKS
Courage to Care
http://www.couragetocare.com.au/index.aspx
Gandel Holocaust Studies Program (via Yad Vashem)
http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/international_projects/australian_educators/scholarships.asp
Jewish Holocaust Centre, Melbourne
http://www.jhc.org.au/
Sydney Jewish Museum
http://www.sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au/