Holocaust Educators Awards will be presented to three
high school and middle school teachers at a special ceremony on Wednesday,
May 10, at 7:30 p.m. in Wilde Auditorium.
The ceremony will include a keynote address by Dr. Michael Good, a
local physician and author who has written the book, My Search for
Major Plagge, about his own search for a righteous gentile who
saved Jews during the Holocaust. Following the address, the winners
will receive their awards and speak about their Holocaust curricula.
The Korzenik and Zola Holocaust Teaching Awards are named for two prominent
Hartford survivors of the Holocaust, Joseph Zola and Joseph
Korzenik, who have continued to devote their lives to the understanding
of the Holocaust in middle and high schools, both locally and regionally.
They have established funds at the University of Hartford to help support
an annual workshop on the teaching of the Holocaust and the awarding
of teaching prizes to outstanding units.
The Joseph Korzenik Holocaust Award will be given to Eleanor
B. Ulbaldini, a teacher at Mercy High School in Middletown. Ulbaldini’s
program, “In Remembrance of the Holocaust: An Individual Can,” was
taught in the areas of sociology, psychology and English and lasted
three weeks, including nearly 700 students at this Catholic institution
in grades 9-12. Sister Mary A. McCarthy, principal of Mercy High School,
wrote of Ulbaldini’s work: “She has the creativity and the passion
to continually open their minds and to expose them to new ideas. Her
keen interest in the Holocaust has been longstanding, thorough and
committed.”
The Joseph Zola Holocaust Award will be given to Jenna Brohinsky of
Elisabeth M. Bennet Middle School in Manchester. Brohinsky’s program, “Exploration
of the Holocaust through Literature,” included 100 students in the
eighth grade for five weeks. Bennet Middle School Principal Ann M.
Richardson wrote of Brohinsky’s work: “She has been inspiring to other
teachers supporting Holocaust units….students have remarked that after
experiencing working with Ms. Brohinsky, that they have new insight
of the devastation of the Holocaust.”
These awards carry cash prizes of $1,000 each and are among the most
prestigious awards for the teaching of the Holocaust in middle and
high schools nationwide and now around the world.
The Zola Development Award for Holocaust Teaching will be presented
to Marsha Goren of Ein Ganim Middle School in Petah Tikva, Israel,
for her project, “Holocaust Remembrance Days -- A Globaldreamers Collaborative
Project.” Goren, who worked with English as a Second Language students
and social studies students in grades 5-8, involved nearly 1,500 students
in her project in this central Israeli town. This project involved
the creation of a website that has been visited by thousands of people
worldwide. The principal of the Ein Ganim Middle School, Hedy Rosenthal,
writes about Goren: “She is working towards the creation of a more
tolerant individual in a multicultural society by teaching such things
as her Holocaust unit.”
The award winners will have an opportunity to speak about their educational
projects and schools. They were chosen from among 15 semi-finalists
that were of an extremely high quality, in part, because of the work
done at the University of Hartford’s Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic
Studies’ annual Holocaust Teachers Workshop.
On May 15, the Greenberg Center, together with the Anti-Defamation
League and the Commission on Jewish Education, will co-sponsor another
workshop at the University of Hartford for middle and high school teachers
based upon a new multimedia curriculum on the Holocaust developed with
the Yad Vashem memorial and the Spielberg Visual History Foundation.
This curriculum will allow teachers to access thousands of interviews
and multi-media presentations in their classrooms. The next one-day
Holocaust Educators Workshop will take place on Monday, Oct. 30, at
the University of Hartford.
For more information on the awards, development grants and the workshops,
contact Richard Freund, director of the Greenberg Center for
Judaic Studies, at 768.4964 or at freund@hartford.edu.