Daviess County teacher selected for Auschwitz Legacy Fellowship
Beth Ewing is the district-wide Virtual Academy Coach and serves as a regional network lead for the University of Kentucky – Jewish Heritage Fund Holocaust Education Initiative. Ewing says the opportunity is an honor, and that she believes the focus will be crucial in understanding the impact of the Holocaust.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation organizes the Auschwitz Legacy Fellowship to help equip educators with the knowledge and resources to effectively teach history to their students. The year-long program will include an study trip to Poland to visit Warsaw, Krakow and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Wall Street Journal
6 days ago
- Wall Street Journal
‘Remember Us to Life' Review: Family Ties Erased By Time
Growing up in Stockholm, the illustrator Joanna Rubin Dranger was faintly aware that her maternal grandfather, David, had family members who had 'disappeared' in Poland during the Holocaust. But such things weren't spoken about during her mother's childhood, and David, who'd emigrated to Sweden as a teenager, had died before Ms. Rubin Dranger was born. The graphic memoir 'Remember Us to Life' is Ms. Rubin Dranger's soulful account of her effort to learn what happened to David's lost relatives. She traces other branches of her family tree as well, including a distant cousin who pulled off a nail-biting escape from Nazi-occupied Norway to the United States. The book opens with a brief chapter on the suicide of the author's adored Aunt Susanne, her mother's sister, a stark reminder of the effects of trauma on subsequent generations. Ms. Rubin Dranger's black-and-white drawings, spare yet richly expressive, are interspersed with family photographs and archival materials, including newspaper articles and political cartoons. Many of the photos had been locked away in attics for decades, unearthed by relatives assisting the author with her project. They depict David's parents and siblings fashionably dressed and laughing, and their effect on Ms. Rubin Dranger is profound. 'It is the very modernity of the pictures that floods me over and over with the incomprehensibility of it all,' she writes. Only David and his brother Chaim, who fled to Palestine, survived; letters between the two capture their mounting desperation and despair when they stop receiving replies from their family in Poland. Throughout the memoir, the author grapples with her place in Sweden, which, despite its official neutrality, allowed Nazi Germany to transport soldiers and weapons across its borders for most of the war. In 2018, while Ms. Rubin Dranger was working on the book, neo-Nazis marched through a Stockholm neighborhood. Later, a swastika was spray-painted on her house. 'The world seems to be turning the wrong way,' she observes.
Wall Street Journal
11-07-2025
- Wall Street Journal
‘I Seek a Kind Person' Review: A Lifeline in the Classified Section
'Nobody wanted us. . . . Nobody opened their doors to us.' Lisbeth Weiss was only 11 when, shortly after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, uncontrolled outbreaks of antisemitic violence confirmed that she and her Viennese Jewish family were in danger. They were also trapped: Even as Hitler's anti-Jewish laws became increasingly vicious, strict regulations against receiving refugees in countries around the world cut off almost all possible exit routes. In their desperation to save their only child, Lisbeth's parents tried a ploy so unusual it is almost absent from the literature of Holocaust history: They placed a classified ad in a Manchester, England, newspaper asking if a British family might step forward to care for a 'clever child worthy of support.' Remarkably—one might almost say miraculously—a family in Oldham, near Manchester, said yes. In 'I Seek a Kind Person,' Julian Borger, an editor with the Guardian newspaper, tracks the histories of Lisbeth and nine other Austrian children who owe their survival to newspaper ads and the people whose answers allowed them to forge new lives in foreign countries. Mr. Borger reveals that his own father, Robert, was one of those young refugees. The emotional costs, he tells us, were steep. Most of the children never saw their families again, often not learning, until decades later, when and where their relatives were murdered. Gertrude Batscha describes her years of uncertainty about her family's fate as a loneliness that 'got in your limbs.' Like several of the adolescent refugees, Gertrude was forced to perform domestic work for her foster family and provide child care for their biological children.
New York Post
07-07-2025
- New York Post
World's Jewish population still hasn't recovered from the Holocaust, shocking analysis shows: ‘Reminder of how many people we lost'
The world's Jewish population has yet to recover from the Holocaust that wiped out more than a third of its members, a stunning new analysis shows. There were an estimated 16.6 million Jews alive in 1939 before the Holocaust killed more than 6 million of them. By comparison, there are about 14.8 million Jews alive today, according to the Pew Research Center. 6 The world's Jewish population has yet to recover from the Holocaust that wiped out more than a third of its members, a stunning new analysis shows. Bettmann Archive The Jewish population did increase by 6.2%, going from 13.91 million to 14.8 million, between 2010 and 2020, figures show. But globally, the overall non-Jewish population jumped 12.3%, from 7 billion to 7.87 billion, during that same time frame, the study said. 'During this time, the rest of the world's population grew about twice as quickly,' Pew noted. Jews account for a tiny 0.2% of the global population. 6 There were an estimated 16.6 million Jews alive in 1939 before the Holocaust killed more than 6 million of them. Getty Images The study's findings come at a vulnerable time for Jews, who are battling a rise in antisemitism triggered by the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza. 'Have Jews made up for the loss of people killed in the Holocaust? The answer is no,' said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. 'It takes a long time to replace a third of the population. It still hasn't happened. It's a reminder of how many people we lost in the Holocaust,' he said. 6 The study's findings come at a vulnerable time for Jews, who are battling a rise in antisemitism triggered by the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza. AFP via Getty Images 6 Weak and ill survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp after its liberation. AFP via Getty Images Pew acknowledged that precisely estimating the size of the world's Jewish population is difficult. Its estimates in Israel are based on the Israeli Ministry of Interior's population register of Jews. Outside of Israel, the definition of Jewishness is based on self-identification with Judaism as a religion. The overwhelming number of the world's Jews live in Israel/the Middle East/North Africa (6.8 million) and North America (6.1 million), mostly in the United States, the study says. The Jewish population jumped by nearly 18% in and around Israel but just 0.6% in North America in the previous decade. 6 'Have Jews made up for the loss of people killed in the Holocaust? The answer is no,' said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. Corbis via Getty Images But it dropped by 8% in Europe, from 1.39 million in 2010 to 1.28 million in 2020, and 37% in sub-Saharan Africa, from 80,000 to 50,000, for the same period. The population increased by 2% in the Asia-Pacific region, rising from 180,000 to 190,000. 'Between 2010 and 2020, the Middle East and North Africa surpassed North America to become the geographic region with the largest Jewish population,' Pew said. 'This is primarily because Israel added over 1 million Jews to its population between 2010 and 2020, compared with an increase of just 30,000 in the U.S.' 6 The overwhelming number of the world's Jews live in Israel/the Middle East/North Africa (6.8 million) and North America (6.1 million), mostly in the United States, the study says. REUTERS Israel and the United States are the only countries with millions of Jewish residents, with 85% of Jews worldwide living in one of the two countries combined. Sarna said the Jewish birth rate is lower in many Western societies as it is for non-Jews, with the exception of Orthodox Jews who marry younger and have larger families.
