Volume 101, Number 23 www.kcjc.com June 10, 2021 30 Sivan 5781
jewish chronicle The KANSAS
CITY
‘I got a complete change in world view’ Efforts of Overland Park teacher demonstrate power of Holocaust education, as Auschwitz exhibit is set to open at Union Station
By Jerry LaMartina Contributing Writer Lisa Bauman’s first glimpse of the German words “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” (“Work sets you free”) perched in wrought iron atop the front gate of Auschwitz enveloped her in a sinister silence. “There’s definitely an oppressive feeling that you get,” Bauman said. “There’s something in the energy, the air, the atmosphere — all of it. It just weighs you down. … From that point on, you can’t even talk. There are no words. There’s a hush.” Bauman is a lifelong Catholic and a teacher. She took that first trip to Auschwitz in 2007 with some of her students from St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic High School in Overland Park, where she taught from 1989 until moving to Blue Valley West, her alma mater, in 2014. She returned to Auschwitz almost every year through 2014, always with Aquinas students. She also visited sites in Berlin and Prague, including other death camps. Bauman was at Auschwitz the day in 2014 when a white supremacist killed three people at Jewish institutions in Overland Park. None of the victims were Jewish. “You think about what might’ve happened if more people had stood up instead of being silent, which is a lesson I try to instill in my students,” she said. “Take action.” As an educator, Bauman has imparted those lessons through classes and student trips. And now similar teachings will be open to a broader audience with the opening next week of the Union Station exhibit, “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.” Bauman hopes to work the exhibit into her curricu-
Lisa Bauman holds an autograph book at a 2012 dedication of a memorial to the Otto Wolf family (a hidden family who survived the Holocaust) that students donated in the forest of Trsice in the Czech Republic. Another teacher, Bonnie Sussman of Oakland, California, is signing the book. (Courtesy Lisa Bauman) lum and will encourage students to see it. The Holocaust was part of Aquinas’ required curriculum, so Bauman immersed herself in the subject. She used the late Elie Wiesel’s “Night” in teaching a course titled “Holocaust Literature: Putting Words into Action” in the mid-1990s. She took “words into action” for the course title from a poster she had gotten at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It also read, “It’s not enough to be compassionate. You must act.” “I brought back that poster and it really became a theme for our freshman year, and it’s been my theme since then,” Bauman said. “It’s not enough to just feel, ‘Wow, that’s terrible that that happened way back
Lisa Bauman, middle, inspects a memorial in Trsice in the Czech Republic with other teachers during a trip in 2012. (Courtesy Lisa Bauman) then,’ but you have to take action and see the world around you and what’s happening today and do what you can in order to try to repair the world.” One year, her students got involved in a Holocaust Museum outreach project responding to the Darfur genocide. Her students wrote and sent postcards to See OVERLAND, PAGE 8
Everything you need to know about the Israeli government that will replace Benjamin Netanyahu By Ben Sales JTA After 12 straight years as Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu is losing power — and the government that’s about to replace him is remarkable in its own right. Netanyahu’s ouster is a huge deal on its own. Over the past decade-plus, as the country’s longest-serving leader, he has become nearly synonymous with Israel — shaping its foreign and domestic policy as well as its international image, and personally guiding its relationship with the United States. Over the past two years, his desire to hold onto power — even as he stands trial on corruption charges — along with
his opponents’ desire to oust him, have driven Israel’s political system into crisis. He has become so personally polarizing that a range of ideological allies turned against him — and are on the verge of replacing him. Now, Netanyahu’s opponents have announced that they have succeeded in defeating him. And when they get sworn in later this month, unless Netanyahu somehow manages to scuttle that, the government they form will itself break boundaries. It will be an unprecedented alliance of political right and left, Jews and Arabs, all dedicated to one goal: ending the Netanyahu era. At the same time, there are ways that, even under new leadership, Israel is unlikely to change.
Here’s what you need to know about Israel’s incoming government. NETANYAHU IS LOSING POWER: HOW WE GOT HERE. Israel has been trying and failing to elect a stable government for more than two years. And Netanyahu has come close to losing power before. But this time, it looks like it’s actually happening. A little background: Netanyahu seemed to have won Israel’s 2019 election, but his former partners deserted him and he couldn’t form a coalition. So Israel held another election. Then it held another. Then yet another. Each time, neither Netanyahu nor his opponents gained a majority. There was a brief interlude where the rivals came together to form a coalition to address the pandemic, but that fell apart pretty quickly. This time around, if Netanyahu’s opponents weren’t able to team up, Israel would have held a fifth election. Almost no one wanted that to happen, so Netan-
yahu’s rivals decided to put aside their vast differences and form a coalition with one goal: to get rid of him. The incoming coalition is a testament to how much Israeli politics has become about Netanyahu himself. Three of the parties in the incoming government largely agree with Netanyahu on policy. But they dislike him so much that they’d rather team up with the Israeli left than give him another term in office. This amounts to a political reset for the Jewish state. To have any real memory of Israel before Netanyahu’s current tenure, you’d have to have been born well before the iPhone was released. For more than a decade, Netanyahu’s personality and politics have dominated Israel. No longer. See HISTORIC, PAGE 10
MORE COVERAGE For additional news from Israel, including more information about the new government, please see Page 15