Leslie Rheingold uses IWitness to teach one of the only yearlong Holocaust studies courses offered in her school district in south Florida.

At Cypress Bay High School, Rheingold teaches five Holocaust studies classes, made up of 10th-12th graders. She uses IWitness, Echoes and Reflections, literature and other media to teach about the Jewish experience throughout the year, but her students are currently doing research in IWitness on a different unit: groups other than Jews who were persecuted during the Holocaust.

Working in teams, students must create Powerpoint or Prezi presentations about their assigned group. Each presentation must include video clips from a credible site; Rheingold said most of the 35 groups have incorporated testimony from IWitness.

Though she has typically had access to many Holocaust survivors in Florida who could come and speak to her students, Rheingold said it is getting harder to find survivors well enough to make the trip. But through IWitness, her students can still “get to know” survivors.

“Each has a unique story, and though no one is ever able to put themselves in the shoes of the victims, my students are able to put faces to the millions who perished,” Rheingold said. “Otherwise, they are just part of a number too large to fathom.”

Testimony also teaches Rheingold’s students the importance of credible sources and eyewitnesses. When they discuss the Holocaust denial movement, testimony can be a powerful tool to fight against those who seek to revise history, she said.

Rheingold, who was the recipient of last year’s Guterman Family Foundation Holocaust Educator of the Year award, said students may not be able to stand up to bigotry today unless they are taught about the actions of Hitler and his followers. The overriding theme of her course is a quote from the film Uprising, about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: “How can a moral man maintain his moral code in an immoral world?”

“This is why it is important to teach Holocaust education all year long: we must teach our children to choose to be kind and compassionate to people who are different than they are,” she said. “We must teach our children so they can teach theirs, so people are not ignorant of the truth, and so people will recognize early on, what can and will happen if we are not ‘upstanders.’”