NCCAT is proud to announce scholarship awards for five outstanding teachers to attend a Holocaust Educator Seminar in Poland this summer. The five scholarship recipients were selected from among 127 teachers who applied. They will be awarded these scholarships from the NCCAT Development Foundation’s Holocaust Endowment Fund.
The winners of the scholarships are:
Tyler Faetz (Macon County)
Heidi Galloway (Burke County)
Christina Speiser (Moore County)
Casey Voss (Stokes County)
Lauren West (Rowan-Salisbury Schools)
The Development Foundation of NCCAT, Inc. maintains a Holocaust Endowment Fund as part of NCCAT’s ongoing support of Holocaust education in North Carolina. The Foundation’s endowment scholarships, for $3000.00 each, will cover the majority of expenses for an intensive one-week seminar in Poland in June 2024.
The teacher participants together with two NCCAT Teacher-educators (also funded by the endowment) will visit the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Majdanek and learn about the Holocaust in the cities of Warsaw, Krakow and Lublin. There will be a special ½ day teacher’s educational seminar at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and a dialogue with Polish high school history teachers.
The trip will be led by Rabbi Fred Guttman and veteran Holocaust educator Lee Holder. Rabbi Guttman has been a Holocaust educator for more than 40 years and has led over 20 educational seminars in Poland. From 1979 to 1991, Rabbi Guttman lived in Israel and served as the rabbi and principal of Alexander Muss High School in Israel. In 2022, Rabbi Guttman received the Lifetime Community Service Award for his work in Civil Rights from the International Civil Rights Center & Museum [ICRCM] in Greensboro. Lee Holder is a longtime North Carolina teacher and member of the NC Council on the Holocaust. He is the director of the Gizella Gross Abramson Resource Center for Holocaust and Civil Rights Education in Kinston, North Carolina. In 2011 he was named the Irena Sendler Award winner, recognizing one outstanding Holocaust educator annually, worldwide, and one in Poland.
Some forty teachers representing more than 20 North Carolina school systems will participate in this program.
NCCAT is pleased to be able to support the “Gizella Abramson Holocaust Education Act,” which became law in November 2021 and requires the development of Holocaust education curriculum for North Carolina schools.
Information about NCCAT’s Holocaust endowment and how to support it can be found at this link:
https://www.nccat.org/make-gift/give-online/holocaust-education-endowment-fund