Last weekend International Holocaust Day was celebrated around the world, and a very special meeting was held last week to mark it. The Holocaust studies program at the Western Galilee Academic College initiated a meeting of therapists working with war refugee children in Ukraine, alongside historians from around the world who are researching the rehabilitation of children after the Holocaust.
As part of the meeting, workshops were held led by the head of the program, Dr. Boaz Cohen, himself a Holocaust researcher who deals a lot with childhood in the shadow of destruction, and rehabilitation and remembrance following the Holocaust. In recent years, Dr. Cohen has conducted a series of joint studies with German researchers on the subject and even lectured in the past on the rehabilitation of children from war zones before Staff of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The workshops focused on the practical work of the education and care teams in the years near the end of World War II, and the insights and lessons that care workers use to rehabilitate refugee children from the war between Russia and Ukraine and other wars.
Dr. Cohen explains: “The experience gained and researched on the treatment of children who survived the Holocaust can be useful in the education and treatment of the hardships of children who were exposed to the events of the war nowadays. Although there is a clear difference between the events in which Jewish children were persecuted to death, lived in ghettos, saw their families and communities persecuted, their parents murdered in front of their eyes and the death and the dead on a daily basis, and wars today, there are still similar elements in the reconstruction process that can be learned from in order to treat And rehabilitate the refugee children today.” The project will also continue abroad when Dr. Cohen will participate next month in an international seminar on the subject with the participation of researchers, lecturers and therapists from Germany, France, the USA and Sweden.
The symposium will be held as part of the “Children of War, Holocaust and Genocide” project, which deals with locating, reconstructing and organizing the knowledge created after the rehabilitation of children after World War II and the Holocaust, and making it available to therapists and policy makers who work with children victims of war and genocide today. This is the seventh year that the Holocaust studies program at the Western Galilee Academy brings together historians and therapists from around the world. The project was born after the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, with the intention of using historical knowledge to benefit children today.
Dr. Cohen points out that one can learn a lot from the reconstruction process after the Holocaust about dealing with phenomena such as loss of trust in adults, hunger, sense of security, loss of family, questions of identity and early independence. “The reality of genocide and war are not the same, but for the children it is hell And we need to learn from the past to help them. Children are the most vulnerable in times of war and the horrors they encounter at a young age affect the rest of their lives.” He emphasizes: “The rehabilitation of children who survived the Holocaust, who grew up to be the generation that built the State of Israel, shows that there is hope in working with children victims of war and genocide and also that there are insights and tools that can to assist To that end, we established this project and this is our motivation to persevere with it and develop it.”