In the wake of an anti-Semitic post on a Great Neck South High School Facebook page, the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County and the Great Neck School District are seeking to work closer together to educate students on tolerance issues, Tolerance Center Chairman Steven Markowitz said last week.
“We’ve only had a fraction of the kids [from Great Neck] in here to learn the lessons we teach,” Markowitz said. “We have to get every kid in here and expose them to serious Holocaust education and how the Holocaust relates to issues of tolerance today.”
Markowitz said he and Tracy Garrison-Feinberg, the director of the center’s Clair Friedlander Education Institute, agreed at a meeting in early April with Great Neck School District Superintendent Tom Dolan to do more education programs with Great Neck students.
Dolan said the three are going to soon meet with Teresa Prendergast, the current assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for Garden City Public Schools who will succeed Dolan as superintendent in July, to discuss the continued relationship between the school district and the center.
“We look forward to continuing to work with the center to find as many ways as possible to serve the needs of our students,” Dolan said.
The two met with Dolan, Markowitz said, after an image of a child made to appear to look like Adolf Hitler with the caption “I’d rather be gassing Jews right now” was posted on a private Facebook page for Great Neck South High School freshman students in March. The image showed a young girl seated next to a young boy with a mustache similar to the one worn by the German dictator and wearing an armband bearing a swastika, both of which appear photoshopped onto the photo.
The phrase, “I’d rather be gassing Jews right now,” appeared above the boy’s head in the photo.
The image was published to a Facebook page called “Freshmen!!! Class of 2018,” which only users who are also Great Neck South students are eligible to join, and removed a few hours later. The image was posted by a non-Great Neck student, the school district has said, but has not identified the student.
These acts of anti-Semitism, Markowitz said, come from tensions in the community that have come from changing demographics.
“All these rapidly changing demographics led to tensions in the community,” Markowitz said. “When you have tensions at the adult level, they will grow into the schools as well.”
To remedy the tension, Markowitz said, children have to learn to speak out against even mild forms of intolerance if they see it. He said he wants to get kids to come to the center to learn more about the Holocaust and its lessons.
Markowitz said the classes they offer to students include a tour of the center’s museum and a discussion with a Holocaust survivor. The survivor talks about their time during the Holocaust and the importance of speaking up when they see intolerance.
“We’ve seen the impact,” Markowitz said. “Kids come back and say these classes changed their lives.”
The center offers tolerance classes to other organizations as well, include North Shore-LIJ.
Markowitz said it is most important to remember the Holocaust didn’t start with the death camps, but that it started with name calling and bullying.
Markowitz, a member of the Village of Great Neck Zoning Board of Appeals, said it is important to differentiate between the Great Neck South Facebook incident and other recent acts of anti-Semitism in Europe.
Anti-Semitic acts in Europe, Markowitz said, result from a combination of centuries old cultural anti-Semitism, leftists hostile to Israel and the growth of radical Islam in Europe. He said any sense of anti-Semitism in Great Neck can be traced to the demographic changes the region has experienced since the 1970s.
By the 1960s, Markowitz said, Great Neck had became a community of mostly Ashkenazi, non-Orthodox Jews, but Sephardi Jews — Jews who had been expelled from Spain and settled largely in the Middle East — had already begun to move to Great Neck by the time Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution.
“The Ashkenazi, non-Orthodox people were progressive, liberal, strongly democratic and very involved,” Markowitz said. There was so much activism and a strong sense of community. Every night there were four or five things going on.”
After the Shah fell, Markowitz said, there was an even larger influx of Persian Jews into Great Neck. As a result, tensions between the Ashkenazi non-Orthodox and the Persian Orthodox became incredibly high, dividing the community.
“[Great Neck] used to be a very cooperative community, everyone got along,” Markowitz said. “Then there were high tensions and a lack of communication among the different groups.”
He said the recent explosion of the Asian population in Great Neck created tensions as well.
According to Markowitz, there is a lack of understanding between the Persian Jewish, Ashkenazi Jewish and Asian communities.
The lack of understanding, Markowitz said, leads to incidents like the one that happened on the Great Neck South High Facebook page.
