Source: Jweekly.com
On April 2, 2012, three students from Bishop O’Dowd High School, a private Catholic school in Oakland, CA., stood in the damp woods outside Trsice, a town in the eastern part of the Czech Republic, participating in the dedication of a memorial to the Wolfs, a family of Jews who spent three years hiding in that very spot during World War II. They had participated in Bonnie Sussman’s Holocaust course and now were participating in the Holocaust Study Tour (HST), a two-week trip to Europe that takes the idea of “hands-on” education to a new level. They were now joined with a dozen other students from around the country and their teachers.
For the past three years, out of the 50 to 60 students who enroll in Ms. Sussman’s Holocaust class — it has become so popular there are now two sections — a small handful get to go on the Holocaust Study Tour (HST), a two-week trip to Europe that takes the idea of “hands-on” education to a new level.
The students, who are accepted, visit Auschwitz and other historic landmarks, meet with survivors and see the real places that served as backdrops in the reading they’ve been doing for three months.
This year, the dedication ceremony was the culmination of more than a decade of research, planning and discovery by Sussman and the two other teachers who led the HST program: Colleen Tambuscio of New Milford High School in New Jersey and Lisa Bauyman of St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Kansas.
Read the entire article in Jweekly.com