Theater provides poignant education on Holocaust Remembrance Day for IDF Educational Leadership Development Program

One of the challenges of a society which places great importance on memorializing the Holocaust is how to avoid de-sensitization of the subject. This year the IDF Educational Leadership Development Program marked Remembrance Day for the Holocaust by inviting the kibbutz theater company to perform “Address Unknown” at the Mandel Leadership Institute.

The play, adapted from a novel written in 1938 by Katherine Kressman Taylor, follows a series of letters between a Jewish art dealer living in San Francisco, and his business partner, who had returned to Germany in 1932 and gradually adopted the Nazi ideology. The play, through the observation of isolated people, touches on essential questions of the ethical and moral deterioration, and the brutalization of an entire society.

“There is great educational value in the play and the way it deals with issues of democracy and with the abyss of our human identity as individuals and as a society,” says Dr. Motti Shalem, Director of the IDF Educational Leadership Development Program.

“The central axis in the Mandel IDF Educational Leadership Development Program is the attempt to confront the participants with different dimensions of their personal and collective identity; as Jews, as Israelis, as Israeli Army officers, as educators, and as human beings. Holocaust education is significant in the program since this chapter is essential to the process of observing every one of those dimensions. ‘Address Unknown’ was therefore a complementary experiential element to the intensive study of the subject, and it seemed to me that the play was particularly fitting.” added Shalem.

Similarly, according to Shalem, the Israeli Army's educational system relates to the Holocaust as a central axis in the process of commander training. For the last four years, the program "Witnesses in Uniform,” has sent hundreds of IDF commanders each year to Poland for a 5-day educational mission.

Although it is clear that in recent years the subject of addressing the Holocaust has become more central in officer training, Shalem states, “It is important to note that the Israeli Army does not replace the discussion of questions of Jewish and national identity with those of the Holocaust, and a variety of prisms are needed when cultivating an educationally-oriented leadership in the army or in our society.”