MANDATORY HOLOCAUST EDUCATION IN BC
Message from Nina Krieger, Executive Director of the VHEC
MLA Selina Robinson, VHEC Executive Director Nina Krieger, BC Premier David Eby, Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver CEO Ezra Shanken, Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver President Alvin Wasserman, MLA George Heyman and VHEC Founding President Dr. Robert Krell at the announcement event on October 30, 2023. Photo by Rhonda Dent Photography.
On October 30, 2023, Premier David Eby announced that, beginning in 2025, the K-12 curriculum will include mandatory Holocaust education for every student in BC, as part of an expanded Grade 10 social studies curriculum.
This is a momentous step in ensuring that all students graduating from high school in BC will learn about the Holocaust and its ongoing lessons.
This announcement is particularly meaningful given a 2018 Holocaust knowledge and awareness survey conducted in Canada by the Azrieli Foundation and the Claims Conference, which revealed critical gaps in knowledge and awareness of basic facts about the Holocaust:
- 62% of young adults (ages 18–34) did not know that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
- 52% could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto.
- 32% of all respondents believed that Canada had an open immigration policy for any Jewish refugees fleeing Europe.
- 22% had not heard of the Holocaust.
The study showed clear correlation between an individual’s awareness about the Holocaust and the likelihood that they would reject antisemitism and neo-Nazism. Holocaust education provides powerful entry-points for fostering critical thinking, social responsibility and moral decision-making. Ultimately, teaching and learning about the Holocaust contributes to a more cohesive and inclusive society, where the dignity and rights of all people are valued.
Through VHEC programs, which typically engage more than 25,000 students each year, young people learn to recognize antisemitism and to be alert to the dangers of hate of all forms. Many of our programs feature Holocaust survivor speakers, and engaging with their testimonies is often described as the single most memorable and meaningful experience of students’ school careers. In fact, we now have teachers bringing students to us that first interacted with our programs as students themselves, and who tell us that they decided to become educators with a commitment to social justice because of a VHEC program.
Our programs often explore points of intersection between the Holocaust and Canadian history, contributing to an understanding of Canadian policies and attitudes related to Jewish refugees before, during and after the Holocaust. We regularly make connections to other communities with exhibitions on topics ranging from Albanian Muslim Rescuers to Shanghai as a refuge during the Holocaust, and with programs featuring Holocaust survivors speaking alongside survivors of First Nations Residential Schools and of the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Like other Holocaust museums, the VHEC is navigating a changing landscape for our work, with evolving student populations, pedagogies and technologies. Two features of this changing landscape—the sharp increase in antisemitism seen globally and in our own backyard, and the loss of Holocaust eyewitnesses—put the significance of Premier Eby’s announcement into sharp focus. The VHEC is being called on with increasing frequency to offer programming in direct response to incidents of antisemitism in educational settings—from elementary schools to post-secondary institutions. These incidents have taken forms such as graffiti and the use of Nazi symbols, playground taunts, and the circulation of antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories. We have also been encountering denial, distortion and trivialization of the Holocaust more than ever.
The fact that the last eyewitnesses to the Holocaust are witnessing a surge in deadly antisemitism is truly heart-breaking. Anguish is also felt by the descendants of Holocaust survivors, who are affected by the legacies of intergenerational trauma.
Premier Eby’s announcement is a meaningful step forward for BC’s Holocaust survivors and their descendants, for the Jewish community broadly, and for all teachers and students in BC. The development of tools and training for educators will be key to the successful implementation of the changes outlined in the announcement and the VHEC stands at the ready to support the Province with our educational resources and professional development offerings, which we look forward to building on to support updates to the curriculum.
As we reflect on this turning point in Holocaust education in our province, we are grateful to the VHEC’s lay leadership and professional staff past and present, and to our volunteers, Teacher Advisory Committee, academic partners and the many organizations that we have collaborated with throughout the years, at the local level and beyond. The VHEC’s involvement with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has provided a global perspective on our activities that will be important as we support the new curriculum.
We are grateful to the Centre for Israel Affairs Pacific Region and Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver for their ongoing commitment to ensuring that the importance of Holocaust education is understood within and beyond the Jewish community.
We are grateful to the extraordinary educators who we work with every day, whose dedication to teaching the Holocaust—in a range of grade levels and subject areas—has contributed to generations of young citizens cognizant of their own roles and responsibilities in shaping a just world.
Most of all, we are grateful to the Holocaust survivors in our community. After a year of several losses in the Vancouver survivor community, we are thinking of those who are not with us, but who contributed to this moment. We can imagine what mandatory Holocaust education in BC would have meant to Bronia Sonnenschein z’l and David Ehrlich z’l, to Leon Kahn z’l and David Shafran z’l, to Louise Sorensen z’l and Alex Buckman z’l, and to many others of blessed memory. We stand on their shoulders as the Province of BC joins the VHEC and our community partners in carrying the torch of Holocaust remembrance and education into the future.
