{"id":229859,"date":"2026-04-13T15:16:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T15:16:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/229859\/"},"modified":"2026-04-13T15:16:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T15:16:07","slug":"as-holocaust-knowledge-lags-florida-targets-teens-with-new-approaches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/229859\/","title":{"rendered":"As Holocaust knowledge lags, Florida targets teens with new approaches"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article was produced as part of\u00a0JTA\u2019s Teen Journalism Fellowship<\/a>, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.<\/p>\n

Quinn Fleming, a sophomore at Winter Park High School near Orlando, Florida, said her only experience with Holocaust education was reading a short text in eighth grade.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was just the basics, that Jews were sent to concentration camps by Nazis, and that was it,\u201d she said. Fleming, who is not Jewish, did not come out of the lesson with a better understanding of the genocide and did her own outside research to become educated on the topic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even though Florida law mandates Holocaust education, Flemings\u2019 experience is not unusual.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite similar mandates in 23 states,\u00a0 a 2020 study from the Claims Conference<\/a> showed that Millennials and Gen Z members in Florida have one of the lowest \u201cHolocaust Knowledge Scores\u201d in the country. In one glaring example, 63% of those surveyed did not know six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Those findings, combined with rising antisemitism and the dwindling number of living survivors, have spurred both government and private institutions in Florida and elsewhere to find and deliver new approaches to teaching about the Holocaust.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida is attempting to fill these gaps by sharing survivor stories.<\/p>\n

The museum\u2019s new Hope & Humanity exhibit, which will be on display for nearly two years, focuses on telling the stories of survivors and approaching Holocaust education from their point of view. While the exhibit is currently at the museum\u2019s Maitland location, it will remain part of a new location in downtown Orlando, set to open in early 2028 as the Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity.<\/p>\n

The museum\u2019s expansion is part of a state-wide effort to make good on the 1994 law that required students to learn about the Holocaust<\/a> in school. The law requires that Florida students gain an understanding of the Holocaust and its effects on the Jewish people and that students should take away a sense of tolerance they can use in a diverse community.\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany<\/a>, almost all of the 200,000-plus Holocaust survivors alive today will be dead by 2040, meaning fewer and fewer young people will have the chance to meet and learn from them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League<\/a> found that antisemitic incidents in Florida increased by 277% from 2020-2024, and 161 incidents in 2024 related to anti-Israel sentiment, an increase from 2023.<\/p>\n

To address these trends, Florida\u2019sa Department of Education will start incorporating Holocaust education into a wider range of classes starting next school year. This includes teaching about Holocaust survivors on a more personal level, including in culinary or music classes. Florida is the first state in the country to use this method, according to Michael Igel, chairman of the Commissioner\u2019s Task Force on Holocaust Education, which guides the department.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of times, these students are learning terrible things about Jewish people before they even get near a textbook,\u201d said Igel. \u201cThe key is that we need to keep evolving [Holocaust education] and stay with our roots of how we\u2019re doing it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Last summer, young people had another local opportunity to learn about the Holocaust. The Winter Park Library hosted a temporary exhibit titled \u201cAmericans in the Holocaust.\u201d It focused on the American perspective of World War II and the Shoah, garnering approximately 9,600 visitors in August of 2025 with a 28% increase in foot traffic compared to the previous year. About a quarter of these visitors were youths.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat teens did seem to respond to was pretty much anything that had an interactive component,\u201d said Rachel Simmons, an archivist at the library. These interactive elements included one-way telephones that played audio, a timeline of newspaper articles during World War II, and a map of the United States\u2019 movement into Germany.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey overwhelmingly gravitated to the third one, which basically had a recording of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his progression going from \u2018We don\u2019t want to be involved in World War II\u2019 to \u2018We have to do this.\u2019 I think they found just engaging with that specific historical audio to be very interesting,\u201d said Simmons.<\/p>\n

In its first few weeks, the Hope & Humanity exhibit, focusing on local Central Florida survivors and their personal experiences in the Holocaust, attracted more than 500 visitors and approximately 950 students from field trips and school presentations.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Hope & Humanity exhibit focuses on local Central Florida survivors and their personal experiences in the Holocaust. (Courtesy HMRECF)<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re really using the site to introduce this concept of highlighting lived experiences of our neighbors, specifically through the lens of the Holocaust,\u201d said Suzanne Grimmer, senior director of museum experiences. \u201cWhat we wanted to do was remind people that the Holocaust is not this distant event that happened in Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Guests follow the stories of 10 survivors who experienced the Holocaust at different ages, in different places, and while practicing Judaism differently, individualizing their narratives.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cToo often, we start with the Holocaust with 1933 or they start with the camps, and you don\u2019t really understand anything about the thousands of years of Jewish life and culture that were erased and then also what it took to rebuild that life and and culture in different places,\u201d said Stephen Poynor, the museum\u2019s senior director of education and community engagement.<\/p>\n

By putting Jewish culture and history at the forefront of Holocaust education the museum hopes to build empathy in school visitors. \u201cIt\u2019s just a different way of teaching the Holocaust, and it\u2019s been really successful so far,\u201d says Grimmer.<\/p>\n

Guests also learn about hate in the present, ending their visit with a wall titled \u201cAnti-Semitism in Florida Today.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re trying to reiterate that this was not something that was invented by the Nazis, and it didn\u2019t go away with the end of the Holocaust,\u201d said Grimmer. \u201cThe first time you even see a swastika in this entire exhibit is on that last wall, and it\u2019s from a rally that happened right here in Orlando in 2023<\/a>. We\u2019re really trying to get people to understand that this is a story that might feel global and very distant in terms of location and time, but at its core, is happening in your own backyard.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new museum will include an AI conversational algorithm that answers questions from visitors with responses from Holocaust survivors based on their recorded testimonies. Additionally, the new location will have a learning lab, where students can connect history to their own communities. The museum will also continue its partnerships with Orange, Seminole and Osceola County Public Schools and its week-long teacher institute, where scholars from around the world provide instruction on teaching the Shoah.<\/p>\n

Offering a variety of Holocaust education opportunities, from school curriculum to museum and library exhibits, specialists like Poynor agree that this helps reach more teens in ways that are meaningful to them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to encourage students to step into their community and to engage, and through some of these stories and through this history, we hope they can connect and engage within their own schools,\u201d said Poynor.<\/p>\n

Reporting the stories that define our era. When history unfolds in real-time, the Jewish world turns to JTA. Your support ensures we can document the complexities of war and the resilience of Jewish communities with integrity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article was produced as part of\u00a0JTA\u2019s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":229860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-229859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}