Please Note:
The new Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center will be located at 9603 Woods Drive in Skokie, Illinois and is scheduled to open early next year.
The Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois museum on Main Street is now closed.
We will begin accepting reservations for the 2008-09 school year on January 15, 2009. In the interim, we will make every effort to provide a speaker for your class, as in year’s past. Directions to request a speaker can be found here.
Please continue to check here for updates on the new museum and education center.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
The Education Team
What Your Students Should Know
These guidelines are developed to prepare you and your middle and high school students for your field trip visit to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center or outreach visit by a member of our Speakers’ Bureau. A visit is meant to engage students and spark their interest. If we succeed, students will leave with more questions than answers, as well as a desire to learn more.
We encourage you to use our pre-visit packet in preparation for your field trip or outreach visit. The packet is designed to help you best prepare your students to respond to the materials they see on their Museum tour or hear during a survivor presentation.
It is important to know that a visit to IHMEC or by a speaker cannot comprehensively cover every event and type of experience surrounding the Holocaust. We do not encourage you to schedule a visit to our museum or by a speaker as an introduction to your study of the Holocaust. Therefore, there are some issues we believe would be useful for your students to understand before their visit. A general understanding would begin with some familiarity or working knowledge of key events in twentieth century history leading up to World War II; a basic understanding of the causes and courses of the war and some familiarity with the causes and results of “Hitler’s War Against the Jews” – the Holocaust.
Why it is Important for Your Students to be Prepared
Core strengths of your students’ visit lie not only in the exhibition but in the survivor or eyewitness presentation. The individual survivor who presents to your students tells of the events of the Holocaust through their own personal story. Your students should be able to listen and appreciate the story of the survivor by being able to place his or her story within the broader historical events of the Holocaust.
In addition, the exhibition presents the experiences of individual Illinois survivors and liberators, enabling students to make connections and to find relevancy. Therefore, the optimal use of a Museum visit is not to teach history per se, but rather to focus students’ attention on an exploration of the varied experiences of our survivors and eyewitnesses. The historical narrative is more effectively taught in the classroom, preferably prior to a visit. The visit should serve to enhance and reinforce your existing Holocaust curriculum, and build upon it by exploring the lessons and applicability of the Holocaust to broader issues of hatred, indifference and genocide.
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