Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Receptive Ears Hear About the Shoah in Poverty-Stricken Iowa

David Wendt teaches ninth-grade English at Keokuk High School, a public high school in Iowa where the 700 students are almost all of German descent. The town has 30 churches for a population that barely exceeds 10,000. Most of the students have never left the town — or met a Jew. Wendt, who is known for the picture of Jerusalem that hangs in his classroom, is a link to a wider world for his students.

Like Barbara Pordy (please see accompanying article), Wendt has found that his students’ adversity often makes them more receptive to his Holocaust education curriculum.

Some 58% of Wendt’s students come from families living below the poverty line. When they read about the starvation in the concentration camps, Wendt said, they can identify firsthand with hunger.

So many of the students live in poverty that they are not shocked by the living conditions experienced in the ghettos of Eastern Europe. It is not uncommon to have several generations living together in tight accommodations. One student explained to Wendt that she lives in a one-bedroom apartment with her parents, grandparents and sister, as well as her sister’s boyfriend and baby.

Wendt says he is thankful that the community and the parents of his students are so receptive and supportive.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.