Hannah Pick photographed by Daryl McCann
On Sunday January 8, 2012,
twenty-three Australian educators gathered in the seminar room on the ground
floor of Prima King’s Hotel, Jerusalem, and officially commenced a
seventeen-day scholarship-funded Holocaust studies programme. One of the Yad
Vashem co-ordinators of the Teaching about the Shoah and Anti-Semitism course invited us to introduce
ourselves and explain why we were foregoing an Australian summer to investigate
the harrowing details of genocide. Learning the importance of tolerance seemed
a priority for many of my compatriots. The logic of this, I assumed, was that
since intolerance played a key role in bringing about the murder of six million
Jews, greater tolerance in society (and in the classroom) creates a better
environment for people to co-exist harmoniously, thus diminishing the
likelihood of another Hitler-style genocide or, at any rate, crimes of a related
but lesser magnitude. For an instant I was almost persuaded – but not quite.
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