King 5 News | April 27, 2022
EDMONDS, Wash. — A new exhibition at Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds showcases the work of holocaust survivor and artist Maria Frank Abrams.
She had a celebrated career including an array of group and solo shows. But like all the artists featured at Cascadia, Abrams’ work eventually disappeared from the mainstream art world.
The museum focuses on neglected or forgotten artists whose work spans the years 1860-1970. Many of them are women and people of color.
"Maria Frank Abrams is a great example of what we do here,” said Sally Ralston, Executive Director of Cascadia. "We are honored to showcase these artists again and bring their art here, and give them the respect their art deserves."
The Reflector | April 18, 2022 | By Sebastian Rubino
Peter Metzelaar, a Holocaust survivor from Amsterdam, shared his story with students at Battle Ground High School during a presentation he gave on April 14.
Metzelaar, who is 86, was born in Amsterdam in 1935. In 1942, when he was 7 years old, the Nazis seized members of his family, who were Jewish. Metzelaar and his mother, Elli, found shelter on a small farm in Mekkinga in northern Holland with the help of Klaas and Roefina Post.
They later moved from place to place in hiding until the war ended in 1945.
“In Holland, it was a very small country, and at that particular time, there were only about 140,000 people of the Jewish faith,” said Metzelaar. “The Nazis took over in May of 1940. By the time it was over in May 1945, of the 140,000 (people), between 75 to 80% were murdered. I don’t even like to use the word killed. They were murdered intentionally.”
FM News 101 KXL | March 16, 2022
Battle Ground, Wash. – Battle Ground High School world history teacher Amanda Fulfer is headed to Poland this July as a part of a program put on by the Holocaust Center for Humanity.
Fulfer tells KXL News “It’s a once in a life time opportunity.”
Fulfer says her background is in East Asian studies, but at the beginning of the pandemic when schools switched to online and changed some of its curriculum, she was told she’d be the only one teaching a brand new European history class and had to figure out how to prepare for it on her own. While prepping she quickly became fascinated by the story of the Holocaust and felt a calling to share those stories from that period to future generations. In Poland she’ll visit Auschwitz Birkenau, the Warsaw Ghetto and Schindler’s factory, saying it will give her a powerful perspective into what she teaches
The Washington Post | February 3, 2022 | By Caitlin Gibson
During Paul Regelbrugge’s 12 years as a middle school English teacher, he saw firsthand the power of teaching Holocaust history through literature — not just for the adolescents in his classrooms but for their families, too. His former students and their parents still write to him, he says, to share how certain works — such as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” a memoir of Wiesel’s experience in concentration camps, and Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a Pulitzer-Prize winning graphic novel in which Jews are drawn as mice and Nazis are depicted as cats — have stayed with them, often revisited in family discussions.
So when news spread that a Tennessee school board had voted unanimously in January to remove “Maus” from its 8th grade curriculum, citing objections to nudity and profanity in the text, Regelbrugge, who is now director of education for the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle, found himself receiving messages from former students once again. This time they were forwarding news stories about the ban, along with their own astonished reactions: Have you heard about this? How could they do this?