The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education (MCHE) has announced its Generation of Memory Initiative with the goal of supporting and engaging family members and descendants of Holocaust survivors to preserve survivors’ histories.
Members of the second, third and fourth generation of Holocaust survivors and their families are invited to upcoming program series intended to build community. MCHE hopes to empower them to find “their own individual paths to participating in the work of Holocaust education and the critical transmission of personal memory.”
MCHE’s educational philosophy is based on local survivor testimony. For many years, it has been able to document and share first-hand transmissions of Holocaust testimony — both in the form of in-person events and archival recordings. Last year, MCHE hosted seven survivor speakers who shared their stories to live audiences.
Alongside the survivors, their children — the second generation — have carried the mantle. Since 2006, MCHE’s Second Generation Speakers Bureau, consisting of children of survivors, gives presentations to help people see the personal impact of this history on families and generations beyond the survivors themselves.
Generation of Memory Initiative programming began in March with a presentation about the fragility of democracy, using the example of the Nazi Party dismantling Germany’s democratic system and implementing a dictatorship in the early 1930s.
Over the course of the next two years, MCHE plans to build on Generation of Memory Initiative programming. Learning opportunities regarding interests unique to survivors’ families, as well as history preservation workshops, testimony collection and community-building social opportunities are all goals of MCHE through this program.
The Generation of Memory Initiative is supported by a grant from the White Family Supporting Foundation at the Jewish Community Foundation.
MCHE welcomes input from families of Holocaust survivors on how it can best meet their needs and recommends joining its mailing list for information about future programming. More information is available by emailing .
