Meriden teachers take part in Anti-Defamation League training at Quinnipiac University

Clarissa Grabiec, Amy Hayes, and Nicole Kolej, three teachers at Platt High School in Meriden, recently completed the Anti-Defamation League training program, “Echoes and Reflections: A Multimedia Curriculum on the Holocaust,” at the School of Education at Quinnipiac University.

“Echoes and Reflections” uses visual history, testimony from survivors of the Holocaust, other witnesses, and additional primary source documents including maps, photographs, timelines, literature excerpts and other materials. The curriculum is primarily used in high schools in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust’s Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority.

In addition, the teachers attended a lecture by Holocaust survivor Anita Ron Schorr, of Fairfield, who shared her stories of surviving concentration camps including Terezin and Auschwitz. Schorr served as a slave laborer in Hamburg before reaching Bergen-Belsen, where she was liberated. She left Israel in 1948 to join the Haganah, a Jewish parliamentary organization, and participated in the War of Independence before coming to the United States in 1959. Despite her horrific and heartbreaking experiences, she leads a life of optimism making Holocaust education a key mission in her life.

Quinnipiac is a private, coeducational, nonsectarian institution located 90 minutes north of New York City and two hours from Boston. The university enrolls 6,500 full-time undergraduate and 2,500 graduate students in 58 undergraduate and more than 20 graduate programs of study in its School of Business and Engineering, School of Communications, School of Education, School of Health Sciences, School of Law, Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine, School of Nursing and College of Arts and Sciences. Quinnipiac consistently ranks among the top regional universities in the North in U.S. News & World Report’s America’s Best Colleges issue. The 2014 issue of U.S. News & World Report’s America’s Best Colleges named Quinnipiac as the top up-and-coming school with master’s programs in the Northern Region. Quinnipiac also is recognized in Princeton Review’s “The Best 377 Colleges.” The Chronicle of Higher Education has named Quinnipiac among the “Great Colleges to Work For.” For more information, please visit www.quinnipiac.edu. Connect with Quinnipiac on Facebook at www.facebook.com/quinnipiacuniversity and follow Quinnipiac on Twitter @QuinnipiacU.