‘We need to hear their stories’: Seton Hill to host Holocaust education conference for K-12 teachers

Seton Hill will host a conference next week to support local educators teaching the Holocaust.

Scheduled for Sunday through Wednesday, the conference will focus on telling the stories of individuals involved in the Holocaust, said James Paharik — director of the university’s National Catholic Center of Holocaust Education.

The center has hosted a similar conference regularly since its founding in 1987, Paharik said.

Though the conference normally invites scholars from across the world to discuss their Holocaust research, this year’s event is aimed at helping Western Pennsylvania’s K-12 educators discuss the genocide with students.

“We believe that if we can train teachers to teach this material effectively to their students that it will have an impact — that it will change peoples’ outlook on the world and will make people more aware of the dangers of antisemitism and other kinds of bigotry and intolerance,” he said.

Hearing the stories of victims, survivors, perpetrators and those who resisted the Nazis helps bring the Holocaust to a level students can understand, he said.

“We need to hear their stories,” he said. “We need to understand what they experienced, and that allows us to empathize with them and to realize that, even though it happened 80 years ago or so, it’s still relevant to things that happen today when people are caught up in violence and political turmoil.”

With acts of antisemitism on the rise nationally, particularly since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, telling the stories of the Holocaust is even more important, he said.

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“What’s going on today, the fallout from the war between Israel and Hamas, that’s affected us here in the United States,” he said. “It’s led to a rise in anti-semitism, it’s led to I think a lot of political differences emerging.”

Reflecting on the Holocaust is a reminder about what can happen when “people who harbor hate toward a population get control of the power of the state,” Paharik said.

The conference’s Kristallnacht service plays a crucial role in this remembrance, said Tony Krzmarzick, Seton Hill’s director of campus ministry.

“I think in the political climate today … doing something like a Kristallnacht service can seem like taking a side, but I think it’s bigger than that,” he said. “I think it’s about doing what is right, and that is to … remember history — remember the past so that we don’t repeat it.”

Also known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” Kristallnacht marks the beginning of the Holocaust. Seton Hill’s service includes a series of readings, prayers and music curated to honor the lives lost during the Holocaust.

“(Kristallnacht) might have been the match that lit the flame that grew into this massive fire,” Krzmarzick said.

“And we need to make sure that we pay attention to any of those matches today and keep them from lighting a bigger movement or a bigger fire that would harm Jewish people in particular, but would harm any group.”