Surrounded by Holocaust survivors and teenagers-turned-lobbyists, Gov. Steve Beshear this morning in Louisville signed into law a resolution expanding opportunities for Kentucky public schoolchildren to learn about the Holocaust and other acts of genocide.

Beshear signed the bill at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church, where eighth-graders at the parish school have lobbied the past three years to get the resolution passed.

“What these students have done is not only a great exercise in politics and the process of legislation,” Beshear said, “it is also and will also serve generations of students to come as they get the opportunity to study and learn from that horrific series of events.”

House Joint Resolution 6 directs the Department of Education to make curriculum materials on the Holocaust and genocide available for optional use in public schools by March 2009.

The resolution, sponsored by Rep. Mary Lou Marzian, D-Louisville, was overwhelmingly approved by the General Assembly.

The students at St. Francis lobbied for the bill in hopes of giving students in public schools the same opportunities they have had to study the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

Ann Klein of Louisville, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp who regularly talks to students about her experiences, said the resolution’s signing was “the most emotional day of my life.”

“I never, ever would have imagined that I would have a day like this,” she said.

The resolution is named after the late Ernie Marx of Louisville, a Holocaust survivor who made his life’s mission to spread education about the horrors he witnessed.
Upon his death last year, Marx was hailed as the local “face of the Holocaust” for his many talks on the subject.

When Marx was 13, just days from his bar mitzvah, the Nazis burned his synagogue during an infamous night of pogroms in 1938 known as Kristallnacht.

Marx was twice detained in concentration camps and later was sheltered by a French priest. He joined the French resistance and eventually came to America.

In his retirement, he led at least 77 student groups in visits to the Holocaust museum, several of them from St. Francis.

Student Casey Biles said she and her fellow students lobbied relentlessly to get the resolution passed this year, building on the efforts of two previous classes of eighth graders.

“We’re not waiting for the world to change,” she said. “We’re changing it now.”

Reporter Peter Smith can be reached at (502) 582-4469.