I am so proud to be a founding member of HERC, as well as an original Board member, as Barbara, Rita and I met with the National Council of Jewish Women’s Board those many years ago and appealed to them to join forces with us to create a Holocaust Education resource that was so sorely needed in our community. We felt strongly that teachers needed to be empowered with knowledge, materials and other resources in order to effectively and appropriately teach lessons from the Holocaust in an effort to prevent history from repeating itself. We had also heard horror stories of well-intentioned teachers doing concentration camp simulations, for example, which deviates from best practices as outlined by the United States Holocaust Museum and other educational experts in the field. We wanted to create an educational environment filled with knowledge and respect, which would foster understanding and create a stage that would nurture peaceful growth for all. We felt that it was necessary to teach the importance of human rights, while exposing the dangers of prejudice, discrimination and hatred of any group of people. These are lessons that we felt were so important and necessary twenty years ago, unfortunately, have proven to be just as important (if not more so) today, in a world that is still filled with bigotry, prejudice, bias and antisemitism.

One of my favorite memories of the early days of HERC came from one of our earliest events. We were holding an event to commemorate Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, a Nazi Program in 1938, which was a prelude to the Holocaust. There was an article in the Tallahassee Democrat that provided historical information and invited the community to join us in our commemoration. We were blessed to hear from an older German woman from the community. She was a war bride, who married an American soldier and ultimately moved to Tallahassee. She reached out to HERC because she felt that our work was so important. She remembered being a young child looking out of her bedroom window and seeing her Jewish friends’ homes and family businesses being destroyed. She had vivid memories of prayer books being burned and people being attacked, until her parents pulled her away from the window. She joined us at our first Kristallnacht event, and provided memorable firsthand testimony.

Unfortunately, the lessons of the Holocaust are just as important today as they were when we first embarked upon this educational journey.