Israeli high school students may not be tested on their knowledge of the Holocaust this year, after the country’s education ministry said discussing the Nazi campaign against Jews could be too traumatic in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel. Israel’s government has called that attack a contemporary attempt at Hitler's genocide.
The Holocaust will remain a topic on the national exam given to high school seniors, but teachers can decide on a class-by-class basis if they want to teach the topic, and students can decide if they want to take part in studying it, Haaretz reported.
Saying that many parents, educators, and mental health professionals have noted that in the wake of Oct. 7, discussing the Holocaust creates “tremendous emotional and psychological difficulties” for students.
Education minister Yoav Kisch, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, later appeared to backtrack from making the topic optional.
"This is a sensitive and complex issue and at this time may even arouse difficulties for students who experienced a lasting shock. However, at the same time, the subject is a principal component in our construction as a nation and a state, therefore the issue will be examined and the decision will be published later on," Kisch, said in a statement after the initial decision was announced.
The topic is especially fraught as Israel is battling a complaint by South Africa in the International Court of Justice, calling its war in Gaza an attempt at “genocide” against Palestinians. Six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust, and the effort to eradicate Jews from Europe was a core reason the United Nations agreed to create the modern State of Israel.
In an initial court ruling on Friday, the court said it would continue to examine South Africa’s allegation, even while refusing to issue an injunction against Israel to halt the fighting.
In December, two psychologists writing in the Jerusalem Post warned that the Oct. 7 attacks may lead to “post-traumatic stress disorder on a scale unprecedented in our history.”
“The October 7 massacre caught us mentally unprepared. While it's impossible to brace oneself fully for such a disaster, the nation was already immersed in a conflict surrounding judicial reform, aggravating our collective stress. Then, disaster struck from the South, shattering us all,” they wrote.
A lesson plan for history teachers published shortly after the Hamas massacre recommended that they "carefully examine whether it suits you to deal with the dilemma and whether it accords with the students' emotional and cognitive state," Haaretz reported.
And it warned teachers that “although the events of October 7 naturally and legitimately aroused associations with the experiences of Jews during the Holocaust, an examination of the broader situation requires us to emphasize the many differences between then and now.”
History has been a key factor used by religious nationalist parties in Israel to justify their occupation of the West Bank and the expansion of settlements in a region they refer to by its Biblical-era Hebrew name, Judea and Samaria.
Haaretz columnist Anshel Pfeffer wrote two years ago that under Netanyahu and his nationalist cabinet, Israel is failing to teach the history of the Jews.Pfeffer argued that the trip to visit Poland and the Auschwitz concentration camp — a requirement for nearly all Israeli high school students — had become “ a nationalist rite of passage for young Israelis, “ and had “contributed to the fetishization of the Holocaust in Israeli society and the woefully incomplete and parochial way history is taught in Israeli schools.”