JCoSS draws lessons from a heroic act of resistance at Pesach

Over the two and half years of their confinement in the ghetto, a group of Jews compiled a secret archive to record their lives. It was codenamed the “Oyneg Shabbos” project and forms the subject of the recently released documentary Who Will Write Our History, which will be shown at the East Barnet school next Tuesday.

The  programme was put together by JCoSS informal Jewish educator Benji Rosenberg and author Antony Lishak, the founder of education charity Learning from the Righteous.

The charity is one of the three causes JCoSS students have chosen to support this year.

For Mr Rosenberg — who was accompanying older JCoSS pupils on the school’s annual trip to Poland this week — learning about the ghetto helps students to understand that the Holocaust “doesn’t exist only of gas chambers and barbed wire”.

Mr Lishak wants children to draw lessons from the “contemporary relevance” of  history. To spot the warning signs before prejudice turns to persecution and to learn from the example of those who chose not to stand by but to act. 

For the JCoSS sessions, he used the Four Questions in the Seder as a teaching springboard. “In the Haggadah, children are told what to say —they are given the answers as well as the questions,” he explained. “But we wanted them to have the chance to ask their own questions.”

For their additional fifth question, one pupil asked, “How can you stand up to oppression without putting yourself in harm’s way?”

Another wrote: “At some Seder tables oranges are used represent feminism and the shank bone is swapped for a picture of a sheep, because of animal cruelty — what Seder plate symbol could be introduced to commemorate the Holocaust?”

While the Oyneg Shabbos project is less well-known than the Ghetto Uprising, learning about it honours the memory of those who created it so they should not be forgotten.

For his own trips to Poland, Mr Lishak knows the power of seeing contemporaneous documents from the Holocaust. Some of the ghetto papers had been too badly damaged to read for years until new techniques were able to decipher them. One he recalled was “a hand-written note by one of the commanders of Mordechai Anielewicz, [leader of the uprising]”.

This documentary legacy is still growing. A recently unearthed diary in Krakow, he said, “shows history is still being discovered”.

Tickets for the screening of Who Will Write Our History are available from suzy@learningfromtherighteous