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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Uncommon Journey

September 1939 – Nazi Austria turns on their Jews and the family Wacs flees Vienna, saving their lives. Destination: Shanghai; alien to them-different language, people, culture. Had they not escaped, one week later war broke out, and this family’s…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Balkan Genocides

During the twentieth century, the Balkan Peninsula was affected by three major waves of genocides and ethnic cleansings, some of which are still being denied today. In Balkan Genocides Paul Mojzes provides a balanced and detailed account of these…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

The Holocaust by Bullets

Father Patrick Desbois documents the daunting task of identifying and examining all the sites where Jews were exterminated by Nazi mobile units in the Ukraine in WWII. Using innovative methodology, interviews, and ballistic evidence, he has determined the location…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

Turkey and the Armenian Ghost

The first genocide of the twentieth century remains unrecognized and unpunished. Turkey continues to deny the slaughter of over a million Ottoman Armenians in 1915 and the following years. What sets the Armenian genocide apart from other mass atrocities…

Audience: 9th-12th

eBook

An American Genocide

Between 1846 and 1873, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported…

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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