Local teacher attends Holocaust instruction seminar

Naperville resident Kimberly Stansbury doesn't remember learning much about the Holocaust in school when she was growing up in Arlington Heights.

Now a seventh- and eighth-grade history teacher at Jefferson Junior High School in Woodridge, Stansbury teaches about the deaths of 6 million Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany as part of the state requirements to provide a unit on genocide.

"Some (students) get very emotional. Some get angry," she said. "They have a hard time with how people could do that to each other."

Stansbury will have much more material to help her eighth-grade students understand the Holocaust for this school year. She was one of two teachers in Illinois selected by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous to participate in a five-day seminar earlier this summer at Columbia University in New York City.

The 37 educators came together to learn from noted Holocaust scholars and from each other on how to best present the material to their students. Most of the seminar participants were from the United States, but they also came from Poland, Croatia, South Africa and Canada, Stansbury said.

"What I like best is meeting people from all over who have the same passion about a subject as you do," she said. "It was eye-opening."

Stansbury said she will share what she learned with the two other eighth-grade teachers at Jefferson who also teach about the Holocaust. She said she was surprised to learn some of the teachers from other states were the only ones presenting material on the Holocaust in their schools.

The U.S. seminar participants were nominated by Holocaust centers throughout the U.S. The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie, where Stansbury serves on an education advisory board, nominated her. The center also provided a scholarship that paid for the cost, other than airfare.

Kelley Szany, assistant director of education at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, said her hope is that Stansbury will become a master teacher to head workshops for other educators throughout the year.

"We nominated her because we felt she had an incredible passion and desire to learn about Holocaust history," Szany said.

The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center opened in April 2009 after spending 30 years in smaller headquarters in Skokie as the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois.

Stansbury said she has taken students to the Illinois Holocaust Museum, as well as invited survivors to the school.

"What makes it real to them is the survivors' testimony," she said.

The seminar participants were asked to read nearly 1,200 pages of material before they came. Stansbury said the material she received at the seminar includes personal narratives and a DVD on survivors who were reunited with their rescuers.

"A lot of people think it was planned out," she said. "It really was them (the Nazis) kind of planning as they went along."

The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous provides financial assistance to elderly and needy non-Jews who risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust.

"We had several lectures on rescue," Stansbury said. "My students are always interested in that."

Eighth-graders at Jefferson Junior High spend a month learning about the Holocaust and other genocides in March or April, Stansbury said.

Stanlee Stahl, executive vice president of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, said the foundation has been offering the annual seminar since the year 2000 to better educate teachers about the Holocaust. The material presented is the equivalent of a doctorate-level program, she said.

"The Holocaust is complex," Shahl said. "The Holocaust was different in every country."

To attend the seminar, educators must be English or social studies teachers at the middle school or high school level who have taught at least five years and are at least four years from retirement. They must be currently teaching about the Holocaust in their classrooms.

Stahl said some teachers have returned to their schools after the seminar and expanded the time they spent on the Holocaust.

"My experience is teachers do indeed change," she said.

Stahl said she found Stansbury and the other teacher from Illinois, Katrina Vainisi of Oak Park, among the seminar's most eager participants.

"She (Stansbury) is a caring, compassionate, very gifted young lady," Shahl said. "She asked good questions."

Stansbury said she has taught about the Holocaust since the beginning of her teaching career in southern Illinois, but initially there were few resources. Now she'll be able to e-mail the scholars she met as well as draw from the additional materials she received.

"I feel so grateful, fortunate and lucky to have this experience and I think my students are going to benefit," she said.