Teacher Guides

Our guides offer support in planning a meaningful Holocaust commemoration at your school as well as deeper explorations of certain topics in New York’s Holocaust Curriculum.

Meeting Hate with Humanity: Life During the Holocaust

Teacher’s Guide
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Designed to aid teachers in preparing students with historical background of the Holocaust, exploring topics such as heritage, antisemitism, and resistance

Love Thy Neighbor: Immigration and the U.S. Experience

Teacher’s Guide
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Explores themes of language, community, work, and social activism through the use of primary documents. Includes a section on U.S. immigration during the Holocaust. Aligned to the New York City Scope and Sequence for Social Studies, as well as the Common Core State Standards.

Zachor… A Guide for Students and Teachers to Study and Memorialize the Holocaust

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Each year, the Museum receives requests from teachers for support in planning meaningful Holocaust commemoration ceremonies at their schools. The Zachor Guide contains detailed instructions about planning a ceremony as well as various resources.

Love in a World of Sorrow: A Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memoirs Teachers Guide

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This Teacher’s Guide accompanies the compelling book by Holocaust survivor Fanya Gottesfeld Heller. This autobiography is well suited for use with high school students in History or English classes because of its broad scope of the Holocaust and the genre of memoir. This Teacher’s Guide offers questions and activities for each chapter and incorporates study of artifacts. Some of the themes teachers explore with their students are: Jewish identity, encountering the Nazis and their collaborators, defiance against the Nazis, rescue, and the end of the war and its aftermath.

Growing Up in Nazi Germany: Teaching Friedrich by Hans Peter Richter

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This curriculum focuses on the young adult book of historic fiction, Friedrich (first published in German in 1961; Puffin Books, 1987). Friedrich provides a starting point for developing an understanding of the events, issues, and personal crises faced by all those living in Germany in the years 1930 to 1942, particularly 1930 to 1939. It can be used by the teacher as part of a more extended study of Holocaust history or Holocaust literature, or stand on its own as literature.

Sosúa: A Refuge for Jews in the Dominican Republic / Un Refugio de Judíos en la Rep̼blica Dominicana Teacher’s Guide

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In the late 1930s few countries were willing to accept Jewish refugees. One nation—the Dominican Republic—opened its doors. Jewish settlers established a small agricultural settlement in Sos̼a that still exists today. The Museum created a bilingual exhibition, in English and Spanish, showing how settlers were recruited, how they came to Sos̼a, what awaited them there, how the settlement grew, and the evolution of this small Jewish community. The Teacher’s Guide, originally developed to correspond with the exhibition of the same name, offers lesson plans with worksheets in English and Spanish, background information about Jewish life, antisemitism, and the Holocaust, and a chronology, glossary, and bibliography. Student worksheets include: To Stay or To Go? / ¿Quedarse o irse?; Building a Society / Construir una sociedad; Establishing a Successful Economy / Establecer una economía exitosa; Pastimes and Cultural Life / Pasatiempos y vida cultural.

Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust Teacher’s Guide

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Originally designed to aid teachers in preparing students for a visit to the special exhibition, Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust. Includes lesson plans for all schools, including those designed specifically for Jewish schools, and a list of additional resources. The activities are designed to encourage students to think about the range of Jewish response and resistance during the Holocaust, reflecting acts to maintain dignity, document the unimaginable, save lives, and resist with arms.

Student Workbooks

Museum of Jewish Heritage Holocaust Curriculum Student Workbook

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For use in conjunction with the Museum’s Holocaust Curriculum Curriculum, these student workbooks are made possible by a grant from the Mildred and Alvin Caplow Fund of The Leo Rosner Foundation.