Making History Together comes to rural Scotland

The Together Plan (TTP), the UK charity working to preserve Jewish heritage in Belarus, has taken its Making History Together programme into a non-Jewish school for the first time. The school, based in the western Highlands of Scotland, has asked not to be named. 

Making History Together started life online, then was adapted and piloted over three years at Yavneh College in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire. It runs in an informal, non-classroom setting, mixing workshops, games, presentations, films, reflection, and arts and crafts. 

The Scottish visit was led by TTP chief executive and co-founder Debra Brunner and project coordinator Olivia Boyd. They were joined by Lewis James Phillips, a photojournalist and conservationist who has been working to capture the forests around Sobibor as part of a soon to be released book. He spoke to pupils about how the forest meant survival for Jews who escaped, hid and fought as partisans. 

Get The Jewish News Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

Unlike their peers in England, who study the Second World War in the same year group, these pupils had not yet covered it. Asked what they knew about the Holocaust, they offered “Auschwitz”, “concentration camps” and “Jews were killed”. 

Over the programme, Brummer and Boyd took them through 700 years of Jewish life and antisemitism, showing how hatred built up over centuries before the Holocaust. The pupils said they had had no idea. They told the team it helped them understand the suffering of the Jewish people, and what they now see on social media. 

In all, around 100 pupils were reached during the visit. 

The teacher of Religious, Moral and Philosophical Education who arranged it said: “The lessons were imperative to pushing back against the growing tide of overt or passive antisemitism in the public education system.

“I personally loved seeing the pupils engage fully with challenging issues; minds were being changed. We have had nothing of this quality in the school that represents the Jewish community, particularly in a rural school that is too far to visit a synagogue.”

Another teacher, who had three classes interact with the exhibition, commented: “I found it has made me want to interact more with Jewish people and be an upstander who does not stand by and let miss information about the Jewish people spread which is exceptionally prevalent today in secular schools. Antisemitism is a dark and growing tide; I have heard more antisemitic comments in the last 3 years than I have heard in the last 26 years of my teaching career.”

They added: “Charities such as The Together Plan are needed and required now more than ever to push back against this dark and growing tide to do something to redress the balance. Please reach out to more non Jewish schools. My hope is that you will be able to come back in successive years to build upon what has been started.”

Debra Brunner, chief executive and co-founder of The Together Plan, said the response was “unbelievable”, adding: “These pupils started with a few words: ‘Auschwitz’, ‘concentration camps’, ‘Hitler’. They left having explored identity, power and leadership, important dates including Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the map of Europe in 1939, the changing borders between Poland and the Soviet Union and understanding how 700 years of antisemitism built up to the Holocaust, and how that hatred still shows up on their phones today.

“It was a journey that we all went on together”

• TTP is UK-based and its work is in and about Belarus, so it cannot access EU heritage grants, and many mainstream funding streams are closed to it. To support the organisation, click here.