We are so pleased to announce the webinar series, Women in the Holocaust, that has been created by educators at Yad Vashem and is being run exclusively for teachers in our network. On Sunday March 3, 2019, 45 teachers across the US as well as those living in Austria, Romania and South America, participated in our first webinar.

Sheryl Ochayon at Yad Vashem has invited Dr. Naama Shik to lead this webinar. We are fortunate to be able to learn from such an esteemed colleague.

Dr. Naama Shik holds a PhD from the University of Tel Aviv, writing her dissertation on the subject “Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau 1942-1945.” Dr. Shik has published articles on various topics related to the unique experience of Jewish women in the camp, such as daily life, pregnancies and births, mother-daughter relations and returning to life after exploitation. She has also published articles about the differences between the testimonies and autobiographical literature published immediately after the war and those published later. She has worked at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies since 1999, and became the Director of the Educational Technologies Department in 2005. In that capacity she is responsible for Yad Vashem’s Massive Open Online Courses on the Holocaust and on Antisemitism, both on the Coursera and FutureLearn platforms, and soon on EdX. Dr. Shik has lectured at many conferences, academic as well as educational, in Israel, the US, Europe and China.

March 3, 2019

It has been said that although all Jews were targeted for the same ultimate fate in the Holocaust, “Along the stations toward extinction … each gender lived its own journey.” Why is this so? Is it legitimate to study the effect of gender on destiny when the Nazi “Final Solution” against the Jewish population was intended as a total genocide, no matter the gender of the victim? Were the experiences of Jewish women in the Holocaust truly different from those of Jewish men?

March 10, 2019

As the chaos escalated and conditions worsened in the ghettos and camps during the Holocaust, women and mothers were preoccupied with daily survival, providing food for their families and staving off illness. This webinar will look at the life-and-death dilemmas that women and mothers faced during the Holocaust, and their attempts to resist dehumanization and death, primarily using diaries and memoirs.

March 17, 2019

Women were often at the very heart of resistance, whether spiritual, cultural or armed. This webinar will focus on the role women played in armed resistance by serving as “couriers” between ghettos and resistance movements. This story has largely remained in the shadows or, perhaps, been overshadowed by the stories of armed resistance in the ghettos of Europe. Yet it is an example of incredible bravery exhibited by a group of Jewish girls and women, whose stories we will tell.