Adam Zimmerman, a 7th grade teacher at Temple Beth Ami, in Rockville, Maryland, teaches young people about the Holocaust at the local Hebrew school.
Zimmerman simplified his teaching of the Holocaust as “a story about a series of events that happened a very long time ago in a place very far away, well before they were born.”
Most of the students have no connection to the events of 80 years ago, but Zimmerman does.
At this time of year at Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, the lessons Zimmerman shares take on even more meaning.
His grandparents, Morris and Frieda Zimmerman, were survivors of the Holocaust.
Morris was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp; Frieda was liberated from Bergen-Belsen. They met in a displaced persons camp in Belgium after the end of the war, Zimmerman explained.
When they met, they had no money and no family around them. They got married in 1948, and eventually emigrated to the United States, where they settled in New York and started a dry cleaning business. There, they raised a son, Zimmerman’s father.
Zimmerman said his grandparents had been living in a concentration camp in 1945. In 1950, they were living in the United States.
“Five years after that, they are citizens. What a turn of events, to say the least,” he said.
While Zimmerman teaches about the Holocaust now, he said he didn’t hear about it directly from his grandparents.
“My grandparents had a very hard time talking about their experiences. They were approached by the Holocaust Museum in D.C., book authors, documentary filmmakers to share their experiences. They never said yes to any of those public requests,” Zimmerman told WTOP. “It was too hard for them to talk about.”
Their losses were profound, Zimmerman explained.
“My grandfather had two sisters who died in the camps. My grandmother lost most of her siblings in the camps,” he said.
Yet, looking back now, Zimmerman reflected on the joy his grandparents managed to find — and create — around them.
After their experiences in some of the most brutal concentration camps created by the Nazis, Zimmerman often still wonders, “How in the world, can you possibly put the pieces back together after those kinds of experiences? I don’t really know how they did it, they just did it.”
“There was a lot of hard work, but there was also a lot of love and a lot of happy moments and a lot of wonderful days spent together just being in each other’s company and enjoying the simple things of life, which their experiences, what they went through, was never very far away,” Zimmerman said of his grandparents’ lives.
The increase in antisemitism — nationally and within the D.C. region — has created what Zimmerman calls a “notable shift” in how the students he teaches see the relevance of the lessons on the Holocaust.
Referring to the incidents of hate and bias directed at Jewish people in recent years, Zimmerman said his students are “seeing it in their schools, on social media feeds. They’re talking about it with their friends. It’s become real to them.”
When asked what can be done about antisemitism when it seems to ebb and flow throughout history, he tells his students they can show through their actions that all the hateful things that are said about Jewish people are not true.
“We can do that by doing very simple things, being kind to family and friends, being a helpful part of your community, doing something to in service of others,” he said. “Showing that our Judaism leads to, as we say, ‘tikkun olam’ — repair the world, make it a little bit better than how you found it.”
“That’s the way to fight back. And each of us has the power to do that,” he added.
Those outside the Jewish faith have a role to play in fighting against antisemitism, Zimmerman said, adding that the Jewish community needs “partners and allies.”
“We also need to be partners and allies, that it can’t just be asking people to stand up for us when we’re targeted, it has to be a two-way street. And that’s ultimately the way to build connections and community across different faiths, across people of different races and ethnicities,” Zimmerman said.
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