Curriculum & Resources

JFCS Holocaust Center curriculum focuses on expanding students’ understanding of the Holocaust and genocide, so they can develop empathy, critical thinking skills, and moral courage.

Resource Types

Curriculum Consultations
Our staff can work with local teachers to support your teaching of the Holocaust and patterns of genocide. Consultations include sharing resources, teaching pedagogies, and connecting Bay Area schools with programming through the JFCS Holocaust Center. Schedule a consultation >

eBook

The Cost of Free Land

“Sharply insightful . . . A monumental piece of work.”—The Boston GlobeAn award-winning author investigates the entangled history of her Jewish ancestors’ land in South Dakota and the Lakota, who were forced off that land by the United States…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Mommy, What’s That Number on Your Arm?

Gloria Hollander Lyon bears witness to the Holocaust in this compelling memoir told from the rare viewpoint of someone who survived seven concentration camps. It is vivid in its detail of her remarkable courage escaping the fate of the…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Fear

In Fear, Jan T. Gross addresses a vexing question: How was this possible? At the center of his investigation is a detailed reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom and how ordinary Poles responded to the spectacle of Jews being murdered…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

The Kindertransport

The Kindertransport—an organized effort to extract children living under the threat of Nazism—lives in the popular memory as well as in literature as a straightforward act of rescue and salvation, but these celebratory accounts leave little room for a…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Counting on America

Counting on America, an uplifting Holocaust memoir, illustrates the escalation of anti-Semitism following Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 (the Anschluss); and the obstacles Jewish refugees faced trying to reach the shores of America. In response to the Nazi…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Who Will Write Our History?

In 1940, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine organization, code named Oyneg Shabes, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to study and document all facets of Jewish life in wartime Poland and to compile an archive that would preserve this history…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Short Hair Detention

In April 1975, Channy Chhi Laux was a happy thirteen-year-old girl who was excited to start a new school year. But as news reports announced that the Khmer Rouge was getting closer to taking control of Cambodia, Channy and…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Salvaged Pages

This stirring collection of diaries written by young people, aged twelve to twenty-two years, during the Holocaust has been fully revised and updated. Some of the writers were refugees, others were in hiding or passing as non-Jews, some were…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

The Holocaust in Romania

In 1930, 757,000 Jews lived in Romania; they constituted the third largest Jewish community in Europe. Today not more than 14,000 Jews live in Romania, most of them elderly. The record of the Holocaust in Romania includes many curious…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

The Jewish Presence in Latin America

Originally published in 1987, this collection of essays is a major contribution toward developing a realistic picture of the Latin American Jewish communities in the late 20th Century. The book will be of interest to students of comparative studies,…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Voyage of the Damned

On May 13, 1939, the luxury liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, one of the last ships to leave Nazi Germany before World War II erupted. Aboard were 937 Jews—some had already been in concentration camps—who believed they had…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity

Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in unprecedented detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire…

Audience: 9th-12th

Curriculum Consultations.
Our staff can work with local teachers to support the continuation of the study of the Holocaust and patterns of genocide in the virtual space. Consultations include sharing resources, virtual teaching pedagogies, and connecting Bay Area schools with virtual programming through the JFCS Holocaust Center. Schedule a consultation >

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