Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre has used the digital boom during the coronavirus pandemic to reach more students than it ever has.
Jennifer Levitt Maxwell, the centre’s education engagement manager, said as soon as lockdown restrictions began, the Elsternwick museum closed and schools moved to remote learning, staff acted quickly to find solutions.
“We immediately started to think ‘how can we still continue to reach students and support teachers?'” she said.
“We know the Holocaust has a lot of complexities and can be challenging for teachers, and lockdown adds another layer of complexity, so we started to look at how we could transform our offering for online.”
The centre has made huge digital progress in just four months. It now offers virtual tours of the museum, a digital Ask a Survivor forum and online workshops with survivors for students all across Australia.
“The silver lining is we were really confined to the four walls in our museum and we see 23,000 students a year and we were at maximum capacity,” Ms Levitt Maxwell said.
“Now we can reach regional Victoria, reaching students who couldn’t afford to come and see us, reaching students in other states who don’t have access; that’s the most exciting element of what’s happened for us.”
Participating in the online project has also been a lifeline for survivors during the stress of the pandemic as Melbourne’s hard lockdown has triggered traumatic memories of isolation and being imprisoned or in hiding.
Read the article by Anna Prytz in The Sydney Morning Herald.