Recognizing the toll that the pandemic was taking on teachers across the US, Senior Director Sondra Perl and Associate Director Jennifer Lemberg organized a virtual reunion in October for graduates of TOLI's flagship seminar in New York City. About 100 Holocaust educators – alumni from 2006-2019 – took part in the Zoom program, enabling them to update one another about their lives and how their TOLI experience continues to inform their teaching.

Diane Williams, a 2007 New York Seminar alumna, commented how the TOLI experience had a profound impact on the some 1500 students she has taught since then. She added, “It still astounds me that in examining the darkest times in our human history, I found my own humanity and a deep sense of empathy for all of mankind.”

In October, under the direction of satellite leaders Scott Lone and Amber Tilley, Wisconsin teachers continued their book study, begun in August with Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz, by reading and then meeting with TOLI Senior Program Director Sondra Perl to discuss her book, On Austrian Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate. On their Zoom session, teachers made poignant connections between Perl’s experience as a Jewish woman teaching the descendants of Nazis and their experiences as largely white teachers working with students of color whose families have inherited the legacy of slavery and other oppressions. Their next meeting, scheduled for January 2021, will feature a discussion of Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which focuses on the housing crisis in Milwaukee.

In October, 17 teachers from around the state joined online with Virginia satellite leaders Nicole Korsen and Jennifer Rodgers to kick off a series of monthly meetings on Holocaust education. To begin, they read Five Chimneys, Olga Lengyel’s chilling memoir about her experiences at Auschwitz, and they were introduced to TOLI’s pedagogical methods. Participants also discussed their year-long inquiry into best practices during which each teacher will engage the others in an interactive lesson. Using this format over the coming months, participants will come to know each other personally and professionally, which will prepare them for the deep learning to come in the June 2021 seminar, Bringing Human Rights into the Classroom through Exploration of the Holocaust and Virginia's History of Racial Injustice.

TOLI wrapped up its 2020 programs in Europe with an eight-week, transnational seminar for teachers from 15 countries, “Holocaust Education and Human Rights.” Other programs, almost all virtual this year, were organized for teachers in Portugal, Poland, Romania and Moldova, Lithuania, and Ukraine. In addition, dozens of mini-grants, requested by TOLI alumni to fund student projects on the Holocaust and its lessons, were awarded to schools in Europe. Under the leadership of International Program Director Oana Nestian-Sandu, TOLI has become one of the leading Holocaust education organizations in Europe.

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