PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation is working with the city to provide Holocaust-related continuing education classes to Philadelphia School District teachers.
They partnered with a Washington, D.C. organization on Friday to provide a unique virtual Holocaust art program geared towards middle school educators, with the goal of helping to teach the lessons of the Holocaust through the story of a survivor and her artwork.
The partnership with Art and Remembrance tells the true story of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, who lived under Nazi occupation starting at the age of 12.
"All my life, my mother always talked about her experiences," said Bernice Steinhardt, Krinitz's daughter and the co-founder of Art and Remembrance.
"For her, it was a very important part of her way of consoling herself, trying to make sense of what happened and the aftermath, her way of staying connected to the family that she loved and lost."
Then, at the age of 50, Steinhardt said her mom decided she wanted to put pictures to those stories.
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"She had never been trained as an artist," Steinhardt said.
"She never thought of herself as an artist, but she could sew anything."
In her 50s and 60s, Krinitz embroidered dozens of pictures meant just for her children.
"But when I saw what she was doing one after another and that this was a series, I realized this had to be out in the world," Steinhardt said.
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"The way this story is shared through embroidery and tapestry, it's just nothing that any of the students will be familiar with," said Eszter Kutas with the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation.
Steinhart explained that part of her mother's narrative, told through embroidery art, has to do with the Jews of her central Poland town being ordered to walk to a train station.
"My mother refused to go," said Steinhart. "She took her 13-year-old sister, and so the two of them said goodbye to their family and they never saw them again."
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Kutas added that weaving art into Holocaust lessons adds another layer of education, and gives teachers an additional way to teach this difficult but necessary material.
"Through bringing in more and more resources that are based in visual arts, we can reach students at a younger age with this content that I find to be critically important," said Kutas.
"What I hope is that it increases their empathy for what happened during the Holocaust. It's very relatable content, because they are similar in age as when Esther (Nisenthal Krinitz's) story, through the embroidery, begins."
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