education as resistance programs & events
education is resistance. honor the resistance. ©
Educating resistance ?
Educating resistance?
In the face of Nazi terror, many Jews resisted the Germans and their collaborators. Underground resistance movements developed in over 100 ghettos in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe. While organized armed resistance was the most direct form of opposition to the Nazis, resistance also included escape, hiding, cultural activity, and other acts of spiritual preservation.
But the deprivations of ghetto life and the constant fear of Nazi terror made resistance difficult and dangerous. In addition to armed resistance, Jews engaged in various forms of unarmed defiance. These included organized attempts at escaping from the ghettos into nearby forests, non-compliance with Nazi demands on the part of certain Jewish community leaders, illegal smuggling of food into the ghettos, and spiritual resistance.
Spiritual resistance refers to attempts by individuals to maintain their humanity, personal integrity, dignity, and sense of civilization in the face of Nazi attempts to dehumanize and degrade them. Most generally, spiritual resistance may refer to the refusal to have one's spirit broken in the midst of the most horrible degradation. Cultural and educational activities, maintenance of community documentation, and clandestine religious observances are three examples of spiritual resistance. *
At Education As Resistance, we take the mission of the Jewish and partisan resistance fighters operating out of the ghettoes, forests, and cities of Nazi-occupied Europe as both the inspiration and model for our approach to teaching and speaking about the Holocaust.
We believe that in doing so, we pass on some part of that spirit of righteous defiance in the face of evil, believing that the essence of that spirit is sustainable through the power of focused, impassioned education.
Education IS resistance.
* adapted from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, Spiritual Resistance in the Ghettos
Jewish partisan fighters operating in the forests of Belarus.
“Freedom Fighters of Nekamah” under the legendary partisan leader Abba Kovner who help liberate Vilna. Photo taken on July 14, 1944, the day after the city was liberated from the Nazis.
Mordechai Anielewicz, young leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising with friends before the war.
A Portrait of Mordechai Anielewicz
Hans, Sophie Scholl with Alan Probst. Founders of The White Rose Society. All three college students were executed by the Nazis for their resistance work.
Elie Wiesel in a French classroom, demonstrating that education is resistance.
Art was their weapon. Music, their resistance.
DEFIANT REQUIEM
DEFIANT REQUIEM tells the little-known story of the Nazi concentration camp, Theresienstadt; in Czechesolvakian, Terezin. Led by imprisoned conductor Rafael Schächter, the inmates of Terezin fought back... with art and music. Through hunger, disease and slave labor, the Jewish inmates of Terezin hold onto their humanity by staging plays, composing opera and using paper and ink to record the horrors around them.
This creative rebellion reaches its peak when Schächter teaches a choir of 150 inmates one of the world's most difficult and powerful choral works, Verdi's Requiem, re-imagined as a condemnation of the Nazis. The choir would ultimately confront the Nazis face to face... and sing to them what they dare not say.
For over ten years, conductor Murry Sidlin has dreamed of bringing the Requiem back to Terezin. Now, through soaring concert footage, powerful survivor recollections, cinematic dramatizations and evocative animation, DEFIANT REQUIEM brings the incredible story of this artistic uprising to life.
I have had the honor of meeting survivor Edgar Krasa, cellmate of Rafael Schächter and member of the chorus at Terezin. A FOUNDATION-level presentation on this dramatic story of the power of music to inspire the human spirit is underway... "coming soon to a theatre near you."
