TPS Teacher’s Guide to

Grade 7

This teacher’s guide includes classroom lessons designed to assist teachers in preparing their students for a visit to the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art. Academic vocabulary, lessons, and resources are included in this guide. The lessons engage students and teachers in observing, writing, listening and discussing the characteristics of the museum’s art and artifacts, the history of the Jewish people, and the people who have contributed to the promotion of understanding between diverse cultures. The lessons address specific curriculum objectives in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, and visual arts/ fine arts for Grade 7. All curricular connections are based on Oklahoma C3 Standards and Common Core State Standards which can be used as interdisciplinary teaching tools.

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Museum Manners

Before you go: Discuss museum behavior with students.

• Sherwin Miller Museum is a place for learning about the Holocaust and viewing Jewish art and artifacts. Certain rules should be followed to keep it a place that is suitable for everyone to visit.

  • Use Inside voices
  • Be respectful of others
  • No running in the museum
  • Do not bring food or drinks
  • Leave backpacks at school or on the bus

• Following these rules will help keep the exhibits safe for everyone to enjoy.

  • Do not touch anything without permission
  • Listen to the docent when he/she is speaking
  • Raise your hand to ask the docent a question
  • Stay with your group and an adult at all times

(Chaperone Expectations)

1. Arrive at the museum with or before the students.

2. Create groups with 10 students per adult.

3. Know the names of students in your group.

4. Continually monitor and correct poor student behavior.

5. No photography or cell phone use during the tour.

Preparing for the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art

Activity 1 – Class Discussion

Tell students they will be visiting the Sherwin Miller Museum to learn about the Holocaust. Ask them what artifacts they expect to see during the visit.

Create a bulletin board in your class about your study of the Holocaust. Include student work, brochures, and photos from Sherwin Miller Museum.

Activity 2 – What Rights Are Most Important to Me?

Adapted from a lesson in “Echoes and Reflections,” by Anti-Defamation League

Provide each student with a copy of the student handout “What Rights are Most Important to Me?” or display a copy on the Smartboard/Promethian. Allow a few minutes for students to rank order the nine items listed.

Lead a class discussion or have small groups discuss how students ranked the rights on the handout and the rationale behind their decisions.

Stress that between 1933 and 1940, Hitler and the Nazis “legally” withdrew or abolished each one of these rights for Jewish citizens!

Activity 2 – (Extended)

After completing the discussion of “What Rights are Most Important to Me?” with the students and using other gathered information have them write a reflection using following questions as prompts:

  • How do you think you would react to all of the restrictions if you were a Jewish person living during 1933-1940?
  • How do you think you would react to all of these polices if you were a non-Jewish German person living during 1933-1940?
  • What do you imagine the overall atmosphere in Germany to be during this time?

What Rights are Most Important to Me?

Adapted from a lesson in “Echoes and Reflections,” by Anti-Defamation League

Directions: Rank the following in order of importance to you, with #1 being the most important and #9 being the least important.

______Date/Marry whomever you choose?

______Go to a public school close to home?

______Live in a neighborhood of your choice?

______Swim and play in a public swimming pool or park?

______Eat what you want, according to taste, culture, and kjkjkjkjkjkreligious custom?

______Be able to own a pet?

______Leave your house whenever you choose?

______Shop in stores and businesses of your choosing?

______Vote?

Activity 3 - Experience the HOLOCAUST Exhibit Using Visual Literacy

When a student reads a visual, he/she needs to look for clues in the parts and whole of the picture. Below are pictures that the students will see in the Holocaust exhibit. Have students identify the subject, plot, and setting in the visuals. (Student may also find other primary source photos and use the same questions to help gain a better understanding of the subject.)

  • Look at the whole photo. Who are the people in the picture? What do they look like? What are they wearing? What does their facial expression tell you? What about their body language, posture, stance? How did they get into the situation in the photo? What are possible relationships between characters or settings in the photo?
  • What’s the setting? Do these characters seem to belong in this setting? What time of day is it? What is the weather?
  • What artifacts do you see? Are there things you don’t recognize?
  • What’s the purpose of the picture? What thoughts and emotions do the images create in you?
  • If the picture is in color, analyze the use of color – What colors do you see first? Does this use of color have a symbolic meaning? What mood or tone does the color scheme express to the viewer?
  • Now look at parts of the picture – foreground, middle ground, background; on left and right; top left corner, bottom right corner – do you see things you didn’t notice at first?

1.

2.

3.

4.

Activity 4 - Investigating Pre- and Post-Holocaust Jewish Populations

The two maps (that are found in the links below) identify the population of Jews in each European country. One map indicates the total number of Jewish population before the Holocaust in 1933, and the other map shows the Jewish population after the Holocaust in 1950. Have students compare the totals to see how the populations of Jews changed during the Holocaust.

Use the maps (from the links below) to answer the following.

  1. What ratio of the total Jewish population in 1933 lived in

A) Southern Europe?

B) Northern & Western Europe?

C) Central Europe?

D) Eastern Europe?

  1. How many countries’ Jewish populations decreased? Increased? Other?
  1. Complete the table.

Country / 1933 Population / 1950 Population / Difference / Percent Change / Increase or Decrease?
Poland
Denmark
Finland
Germany
  1. What is the ratio of the 1950 Jewish population to the 1933 Jewish population for the

A) Soviet Union?

B) Norway?

C) Do these two ratios make a proportion? If so, what does this indicate about the population changes? Show your work and explain your reasoning.

In 1933, the total European Jewish population was 9,500,000. If two out of every three European Jewish persons were killed, estimate the total European Jewish population following the Holocaust. Show your work and explain in words your reasoning.

ACTIVITY 5 - How Unique Are You and Your Traits?

Heredity is the passing of physical characteristics from the parents to the child. Genes that come from your mom and dad determine your traits.

Find out how many students in your class have some of the following genetic traits. All people and their traits are special. No one group is better than another. All your traits make you uniquely you.

Hand Clasping

Have students clasp their hands together. Most students will place their left thumb on top of their right. This is the dominant phenotype (visible trait). Have students clasp their hands so that the opposite thumb is on top. Have students write or describe how that feels?

Tongue Rolling

Have students try to roll the sides of their tongue upwards to form a closed tube. If a student is able to do it he/she has the dominant phenotype for this motor skill. Those who cannot roll their tongue have the recessive trait. Students will not be able to roll their tongue, no matter how hard they try. (Using mirrors is a fun option for the students.)

Facial Dimples

Have students form big smiles. Dimples should be visible on the students with the dominant phenotype. A dimple can be only on one side of the face or on both sides.

ACTIVITY 5 – (extension)

Have students take photos of themselves recording which traits they have (dominant) or (recessive). Use the following list or create your own –

DominantRecessive

DimpleNo dimple

Cleft ChinNo Cleft Chin

Free ear lobeAttached ear lobe

Straight thumbHitchhiker thumb

Right handedLeft handed

ACTIVITY 6 - Literary - “Overview of the Holocaust”

Read and discuss the “Overview of the Holocaust” to gain background information on the Sherwin Miller museum.

This large work may be divided into smaller segments and read “Jigsaw Style.” In a Jigsaw, the material is divided into smaller segments. Form groups of six students. Each student in a group is given a different small segment to read and study, and then each student teaches their group the information from the part they read. Teachers may divide the material by paragraph 1-6, 7-10, 11-15, 16-19, 20-22, and 23-28. (An asterisk * marks these divisions in the reading below.)

Overview of the Holocaust

By Ruth Ann Cooper, former Curriculum Coordinator

for English/Language Arts for Tulsa Public Schools

*When Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, he had two major goals. One was to obtain more living space for the German people, and the other was to rid Europe of its Jewish people and others that he deemed undesirables.

He began World War II in September 1939 by attacking Poland, but his war against the Jews began much earlier.

The Holocaust was an unparalleled event in human history. It has been said that in the Holocaust, something went wrong with humanity. Man didn’t go mad; he went evil. The Holocaust happened to a particular people at a particular time, but it is not just a Jewish issue. Its human significance is universal.

The Holocaust was one of the most massive and extensive genocides ever perpetrated. Never before had a modern, civilized state implemented a plan to kill every last person of a particular group simply for the “crime” of being born into that particular group. It didn’t matter that a Jew was not religious and never worshipped in a synagogue. It didn’t matter if a Jew had converted to Christianity. In the Nazis’ eyes, they were still Jews.

In addition to Jews, other groups and individuals were victims of the Nazi effort to establish the myth of “Aryan supremacy.” They selected out the infirm, mentally and physically disabled, homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Slavic people, and members of other religious and political groups as objects of hate.

In the Holocaust, 6 million Jews were murdered and 5 million from other groups. It was systematically and gradually enacted with all the propaganda, legal and technological means available to the German nation. The implementation of the plan was so important for the Nazi state that it created all the means necessary to carry it out. It became the national priority, gaining more importance than even military objectives. A wide network of bureaucrats and technicians were used to create a ruthless machinery of death which murdered millions of people in industrialized fashion and processed their bodies in specially-built death camps.

*Although the Holocaust was to culminate in a massive industry of death camps and slave labor camps, it did not begin with any unusual brutality.

It began with scattered individual acts against the Jews which were endorsed by the German state, making the victims feel insecure and unwelcome. By 1935, two years after Hitler came to power, the German government introduced systematic legislation, defining the Jews and then setting them apart, at first gradually and then sharply, from Aryan or pure German society. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 defined Jews as a racial group, regardless of the religion they practiced, if any, or the views they held. In the years between 1935 and 1939, Jews were removed from the civil service, from courts and commerce, and from schools and universities.

On November 9, 1938, 191 synagogues in Germany and Austria were burned, thousands of Jewish businesses were looted and destroyed, 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to prison or labor camps, and close to 100 Jews were killed. This night is called Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.

After the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the war quickened the pace of persecution and made the killings possible. The Nazis intensified their use of force and increased the pace of violence after each occupied country surrendered and the people were subdued. In 1940-41, mobile killing units, known as Einzatzgruppen, followed the invading Nazi armies eastward and killed thousands of people by rounding them up, bringing them to a spot at the edge of the town or village, forcing them to dig their own graves, and shooting them one by one. More than one and a half million Jews were killed in this process as were thousands of political leaders, intellectuals, teachers, journalists, writers and scholars, all without a trial or even charges. It was a disciplined killing process, and whole families and entire villages were eliminated in this way.

*The pace quickened again. Nazi officials wanted to find a better way of killing people, one that was less damaging to the killers’ sensibilities. Concentration camps, which had mainly been used for political prisoners, were enlarged. Others were newly constructed, often near major railroad intersections in Poland and Germany. There were six camps built in Poland with special apparatus specifically designed for mass murder. They were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanak, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

The Nazis first herded the Jews into special sections of the larger cities. These ghettos were crowded, and soon disease, and lack of food and sanitation facilities made the ghettos places of death. Those who survived the ghettos were transported in cattle cars to concentration camps or to the death camps where some were worked as slave laborers, some maintained as prisoners, but most were killed immediately in gas chambers.

The Holocaust began with individual, anti-Semitic acts which made the people feel insecure and fearful. But at the height of the terror, more than 10,000 people a day were killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and the numbers at the other death camps were not far behind.

Hitler and his henchmen were not monsters; they were ordinary men who used the power, technology, and education of an industrialized nation to destroy millions of people, families, and a culture, in their quest for Aryan supremacy. They could not have succeeded without all the thousands of planners, participants, and collaborators, and the passive consent of the free world. Each new escalation of horror developed logically, in large part because the rest of the world refused to provide sanctuary, and chose instead to remain silent.

Albert Einstein said, “The world is too dangerous to live in – not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who stand by and let them.” In the Holocaust, entire nations stood by and did nothing while people were murdered by the thousands each day.

*The story of the SS St. Louis is a poignant example of nations who did nothing. The SS St. Louis was one of the last large luxury liners to sail from Germany before World War II began in September of 1939. It sailed from Hamburg on May 13 with 937 passengers aboard. Most were Jews who had bought visas to Cuba and were looking forward to a safe haven there. Some were planning to join relatives in the United States as soon as it could be arranged.

While the ship was in the mid-Atlantic, a power struggle took place in the Cuban government. As a result, the refugees’ visas were not honored upon arrival in Havana and the passengers could not disembark. The ship then sailed near the Miami harbor, hoping the United States government would allow them to enter. But the United States refused to give them refuge. A special appeal was made to President Roosevelt, but he refused to amend the strict immigration quotas for the St. Louis passengers. The ship was forced to return to Europe. Only France, Holland, Belgium, and England permitted the passengers to enter, and only those who went to England were relatively safe as Germany proceeded to invade the other countries. Many of the refugees were eventually sent to concentration camps, where they perished.

The Holocaust has every example of man’s capacity for evil, but it also contains every example of man’s capacity for good. There were people who felt it was their moral responsibility to help the victims, even when it meant risking their own lives and the lives of their families. These people had a choice to make, and they chose to help.