Experiences and contributions of Jewish communities and the impact of antisemitism on these communities.
Learning about settler and newcomer groups in Canada has been expanded to explicitly include experiences and contributions of Jewish communities.
Students learn to identify some of the impacts of antisemitism on these communities’ development and/or identities.
See A3.7
May is an important time of the year for Canada’s Jewish community, as we celebrate Jewish heritage month. In May 2025, 80 years since the liberation of survivors from Nazi concentration camps and occupied territories, we encourage Canadian educators to find opportunities to integrate the voices of Holocaust survivors and foster lessons on first person testimony and intergenerational learning in your classroom.
Survivor and witness testimonies—firsthand accounts from individuals who lived through or encountered genocide and other atrocities—help students more deeply appreciate and empathize with the “human and inhuman dimensions of the Holocaust” and other difficult periods of history. They support what we can learn from historians and secondary sources by offering unique perspectives on the terrible complexities of situations individuals were forced to confront during the Holocaust.
These lessons cannot wait; eyewitnesses to the Holocaust are increasingly few in number, and the impact is already being felt in public perceptions of this history.
In January, Deborah Lyons, Canada’s Special Envoy on Antisemitism and Holocaust Remembrance spoke on the alarming spread of misinformation relating to this history among young Canadians, commenting on the importance of survivor testimony in preserving the truth: “A story like the Holocaust is first and foremost an emotional story. It is not just about the facts, and so losing those survivors now as they pass on is particularly challenging for us to work through new ways of helping people understand the story of the Holocaust.”
The scope of this challenge became more clear in 2024, when the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany published what it called an “unprecedented” demographic study on Holocaust survivors, reporting about 245,000 people who had survived it were still alive. At that time there were 5,800 survivors living in Canada. The number has dwindled further since then.
Thankfully, there are many speakers still willing to share their memories and insights and they are eager to talk with Canadian students. Contact FWSC today to explore opportunities for in-person and virtual live testimony-sharing, or explore FSWC’s “Never Forget Me” Testimony collection, accessible here: https://www.fswc.ca/never-forget-me-learning-from-survivors
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