Virtual Professional Development Workshop: Theresienstadt

In partnership with The Defiant Requiem Foundation we invite teachers to a virtual Professional Development Workshop on Monday, January 29, 2024 (New York Statewide Professional Day) at 9AM EST to present a new set of lesson plans designed to help students engage critically with memoirs, artwork, and other primary sources in the LBI archives that document the experience of Theresienstadt.

In this virtual half-day professional development workshop, we will launch a series of brand-new lesson plans centered on the themes of resistance, propaganda, childhood, and transit, the lessons were designed by veteran Holocaust educators to impart fundamental knowledge about the Jewish experience of the Holocaust while building the skills necessary to evaluate primary sources. 

After an introduction to both organizations and their teaching resources, the LBI will present a virtual walk through of their online exhibition, The Last Stop Before the Last Stop: Theresienstadt 1942-45. Then, teachers will have the option to join small discussion groups to learn more about two of the four lesson plans. 

The four lessons that teachers will be able to choose from are as follows: 

1. “An Image Is Not Always Worth a 1000 Words”: Propaganda
   
2. “Last Stop Before the Last Stop”: Transit 
   
3. Children in Terezín 
   
4. Intellectual Resistance 
   

At the end of the workshop, teachers will have gained in-depth understanding of two new lesson plans (and will be provided all four lessons) to teach about the Holocaust in social studies, English language arts, music or art classes.

LBI and DRF will provide a certificate stating that participants have earned 3 hours of professional development training. Participants will also receive a free book, In Echtzeit: Posts from the Past. 1938 from a Jewish Perspective. In Echtzeit signifies a watershed moment in the history of German-speaking Jewry, through personal documents that detail the experiences and hardships they suffered in the shadow of Nazi persecution and the cataclysmic events of 1938.