This Jewish Sect Doesn't Teach Its Kids About the Holocaust. Time to Change | Opinion

I am the granddaughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria.

My Hungarian grandparents were dealt a similar fate to the other Jews in their country, taken by the Nazis beginning in mid-1944. More than half a million members of the community were murdered in a short time as the Nazis stepped up their extermination machine. Religious observance was an irrelevant factor as the Nazis marked all Jews for death.

My grandfather, one of 11 siblings, survived with one of his brothers and two sisters. My grandmother survived with one sister—Clara—both hidden in plain sight as non-Jewish medical aides, their blonde hair and blue eyes concealing their identity. After the war, they moved close to a Hasidic community called Satmar. Founded in Szatmar, Hungary, in 1928, Satmar is the largest Hasidic group today, with about 100,000 followers worldwide. In New York State, there are sizable Satmar communities in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the town of Monroe in Orange County. Their influence is large throughout the Hasidic world.

Aside from these meager details, I have no stories about how my relatives perished and where. I don't even know most of their names. To tighten its already stringent adherence to Jewish tradition, the leadership of the Satmar community has banned most secular education from its schools. Shockingly, this includes Holocaust education.

Other Jewish people have names of villages and family trees. They know which concentration camps their relatives were taken to and how they got there. They even have artifacts from that time: a smuggled siddur (prayer book), a torn tallis (a prayer shawl). They have participated in Holocaust memorial events or traveled back to Europe to visit the camps.

For me and others in the Hasidic community, it is not just the places, names and dates that are missing; when it comes to their family's Shoah story there is no narrative at all.

The lack of detailed information created a void which is filled with anxiety. This anxiety was again triggered by the attack on Jews by Hamas on Oct. 7 in Israel and has not left me.

As a child, I had nightmares of lying cold and naked in triple bunk beds, my DNA knowing things I was never told. Curious to learn what happened, I was forbidden from reading books on the Holocaust, and we never used the words "Holocaust" or "Shoah." Nor did we attend memorial services or visit Holocaust museums. Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, did not exist for us.

Part of my journey as an adult has been to reclaim my family's lost Shoah story.

I recently took a DNA test showing that I was 100 percent Ashkenazi, which is what Jews who lived in Northern Europe are called. Ashkenazi Jews formed by far the largest group of Jews killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. I was able to construct my family tree from entries others had put into a website. I was overwhelmed with emotion as I started to identify dozens of young children, cousins who perished in the Holocaust. Two-year-olds, 5-year-olds, babies; young married couples and older men and women. All their lives abruptly ended in 1944.

Now, as antisemitism sweeps the world, fills American college campuses, and is expressed out in the open, my mind continuously goes back to those times.

When I see Jewish-owned businesses boycotted and vandalized and posters of Jewish hostages taken by Hamas heartlessly ripped down by strangers claiming they are "propaganda" I feel deeply connected to the suffering of my ancestors.

The sight of New Yorkers chanting "Intifada" while marching through midtown Manhattan or in Morningside Heights fills me with fear.

Seeing what is happening around me—even in my own Brooklyn neighborhood—I have a need to understand what happened to my family so I can better understand what is happening to me and my children and grandchildren now.

You see, not only are there few stories told in Hasidic homes, but in most Hasidic schools the history of the Holocaust is absent. Despite the fact that boys spend close to 12 hours a day in school, and girls have a more robust curriculum, there is no study of the Shoah. In 1994, New York State enacted a requirement that Holocaust education be included in the curriculum but nothing changed. It remains absent from the yeshiva (religious schools) curriculum to the present day.

What students are told is that Nazis killed us because we are Jews, and that Jews are hated. They are told that the reason why Hashem (God) allowed this to happen is because we deserved it. We were not pious enough.

The response to the Shoah in my community of origin has been greater religious severity. Stricter rules. Less secular education in schools. More suspicion and distance from liberal Jews. There is constant self-blame and judgment.

I cannot fault my traumatized family for this omission, but I do expect our rabbinic leadership to do better.

What we need at this moment is communal mourning that can only come from facing the terrible truth about our personal Holocaust history. That is the prerequisite for healing.

Since Oct. 7, I've heard numerous people talk about the vital need for Holocaust education as a hedge against antisemitism. While there is certainly logic in that thinking, the sad fact is that I don't believe that learning the details of what happened to European Jews nearly a century ago will change hate-poisoned minds. Antisemitism seems to be an unfortunate fact of life and we are in a moment of its resurgence.

I am however pushing for Holocaust education within Hasidic schools. After a 75-year respite, Jew-hatred is back in force. To grapple with this terrible new reality, we need to compare it with what came before. We need to face our truth before we can finally let go of the deep trauma that is holding our community in its grip.

I have deep love and compassion for my community. At this somber moment, I am calling upon the rabbis and leadership of the Hasidic yeshivas to promote Holocaust education and provide Hasidic children with their birthright: the truth about their past. I am calling for a fact-based curriculum that centers blame on the perpetrators of evil and not the victims themselves.

In this way, we honor those who came before us and we fill that anxious void with the names of villages, dates, concentration camps, escape stories, names of victims and survivors alike.

In this way, we can chart a roadmap to the future, letting go of the self-blame and trauma, building a Jewish future based on knowledge, education, and strength.

Beatrice Weber is a public speaker, writer and activist, and the executive director of YAFFED, a nonprofit which advocates for education justice in the Hasidic and Haredi community.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.