“We share a commitment to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and to honour those who stood against it.”
-- Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust
LJCC Reports on Success of Holocaust Education Website
11.03.2013
The London Jewish Cultural Centre has just published to sponsors and partners a two year report on the website www.theholocaustexplained.org.
The site is designed for school students, aged 11 – 16 years. It follows the National Curriculum in England for Holocaust studies for students aged 11-14 years and was launched in January 2011 by the UK Secretary for Education at an event at the Foreign Office hosted by the UK’s Head of Delegation to the IHRA, Sir Andrew Burns. The module for 14-16 year olds was launched on 9 November 2012 to mark the anniversary of the November 1938 pogroms.
In the two years since its launch, the site has had just over 600,000 visits representing half a million individual visitors. Although designed for school students in this age range, the site has been widely used in primary schools, senior schools and at college levels. Beyond the schools structure, it is being used by many different organizations including youth groups and community organizations to support Holocaust education.
The visitors have viewed over 2,000,000 web pages and are spending sizeable amounts of time on the site. 90% of the visits are originating in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the United States. The remaining 10% are originating in a further 26 countries.
This project was LJCC’s first venture into digitalizing history and made use of all of LJCC’s expertise including in Holocaust teaching, experience from survivors in speaking at schools, LJCC’s film archive (one of the largest Jewish material film archives in Europe) and the cooperation and support of Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and others.
The significance of the site is underlined by the support given to it by the UK educational authorities and the UK agency responsible for e-learning. They are actively promoting the site as a resource students and teachers should use for Holocaust studies.
For more information contact alanfell [at] ljcc.org.uk or ziva [at] ljcc.org.uk