To commemorate Yom HaShoah this year, Yeshiva University’s Association of Modern Orthodox Day Schools and Yeshiva High Schools (AMODS) facilitated and moderated a two-hour video conference between Yad Vashem and six AMODS-networked schools in the United States and Canada.
The video hook-up, held Monday, April 16 via the AMODS Global Learning Initiative, enabled high school students at the six locations to hear presentations by Shulamith Inbar and Ruth Brand. Inbar and Brand spoke from the Jerusalem location and answered students’ questions interactively.
Inbar, pedagogical director of the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, is a member of the International Task Force on Holocaust Remembrance and Education. She spoke on “Dilemmas in Hiding: Separation of Families and the Religious Implications on their Everyday Life.”
Brand, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and a death march to Bergen Belsen, spoke on “A Personal Journey of Faith and Deliverance.” Nathan Kruman, AMODS associate director, moderated the question and answer sessions.
“The high school students who participated in this event had an experience that was unique and memorable,” Kruman said.
“Dr. Inbar’s lecture on the dilemmas encountered by families who had to separate raised issues that students probably had not considered before,” he continued. “And Ruth Brand’s first-hand account of her experience at the hands of the Nazis had to have been difficult for them to listen to. Opportunities to hear testimonies such as these do not come frequently, and from them students can form lasting images and impressions.”
AMODS is a division of the Yeshiva University Center for the Jewish Future. GLI is its teleconferencing program of lectures and shiurim (discourses) for a network of schools across the country. Schools participating in the Yom HaShoah teleconference were Akiva Hebrew High School in Detroit, Hebrew Academy of Montreal, Shalhevet School in Los Angeles, Hillel Yeshiva High School in Deal, N.J., Yavneh Academy in Dallas and Hillel Academy in Pittsburgh.