'People didn’t just wake up one day and there was a Holocaust.' Event seeks to combat hate

CANTON − On the day set aside to memorialize the 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust, local Jewish leaders sought to teach Stark County students how to combat hate.

Roughly 60 students from Alliance, Northwest and Perry schools attended the inaugural A Day of Remembrance-A Day Against Hate Tuesday at Bei Ha’am, which is the building that houses the Canton Jewish Community Federation, Temple Israel and Shaaray Torah Synagogue.

Tuesday marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, known as Yom HaShoah in Hebrew.

Paul Hervey, president of the Canton Jewish Community Federation, said he wanted to create a program to help avoid the possibility of another Holocaust.

“I wanted to start a new program that looks to the future and not to the past,” said Hervey, whose grandparents escaped before the Holocaust. “… Our community knows full well the dangers of uncontrolled hatred. I think that it is our obligation to use the blessings of our survival to teach others how to watch out for and control hatred in any form.”

The nonreligious program included first-person written stories of genocide survivors – not just from the Holocaust but also from minorities in Rwanda, Turkey and the Soviet Union  – and writing exercises where students approached various scenarios, mostly involving bullying, from different perspectives, such as from a teacher’s or a parent’s view.

Kelly Fishman, interim regional director and education director for the Anti-Defamation League in Cleveland, walked the students through the different levels of the Pyramid of Hate, which shows how hate builds from unaddressed biased attitudes to acts of bias, discrimination, violence and even genocide.

“People didn’t just wake up one day and there was a Holocaust,” Fishman said. “It started with biased attitudes.”

She said one way to stop hate is to recognize and include others.

“When people feel seen, we don’t move up the pyramid,” she said.

Hate on the rise

The Anti-Defamation League’s annual tally of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault in the United States shows that hate is on the rise nationally. It found that incidents in 2022 were 36% higher nationwide compared with 2021 and were the highest number on record since the league began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979. It also found significant surges of incidents in K-12 schools (a 49% increase) and on college campuses (a 41% increase).

Fishman said locally a grand jury's decision to not indict the Akron City police officers who killed Jayland Walker might have produced what she called “big feelings.” Social media posts of a year-old video showing three Jackson High School girls yelling a racially derogatory word into the camera while a mother stands also has inflamed tensions in the community.

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Students on Tuesday shared their own examples of when they’ve seen hate and bullying manifest in their own schools: A student whose teacher wouldn’t use their preferred pronoun, which led to students believing it was acceptable to not accept other people’s pronouns and escalated to everyone disrespecting the person. A choir concert member who identifies as the opposite sex not given a private place to change their clothes. A student who has been bullied for years under the false assumption that he’s gay based on the clothes he wears, how he talks and the activities he participates in.

Brothers Landen and Kyle Burgess, both juniors at Northwest High School, said they appreciated being able to discuss the topics in a setting where everyone was treated equally.

“I like that I could share my personal experience in a safe environment,” Landen Burgess said.

Vincent Anderson, a sophomore from Alliance High School, found the Pyramid of Hate helpful.

“The value of the Pyramid of Hate is that it shows you some of the lesser-known biases that might happen on a day-to-day basis,” he said.

Peace for Packs

Beyond Tuesday’s lessons, students were given a peace tag to attach to their backpacks that includes steps they should take if they are a victim of a hate crime or hate incident.

Julie Zorn, director of outreach and education for Temple Israel, said the tags are part of a new Temple Israel initiative called Peace for Packs that will launch at the end of the month.

She hopes that the tags will encourage people to report a hate crime or incident.

Temple Israel also is creating a corresponding website where people will be able to report their peaceful incidents, which will be displayed on a peace page.

Reach Kelli at 330-580-8339 or kelli.weir@cantonrep.com.

On Twitter: @kweirREP

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Day Against Hate held on Holocaust Remembrance Day in Stark County