Turning the pages back... December 13, 1993 (12/13/98)

Turning the pages back...

December 13, 1993

Five years ago on December 13, the Great Famine in Ukraine became a heated issue in the New Jersey State Legislature.

In a news story published in The Weekly on December 26, 1993, Walter Bodnar wrote: "A Ukrainian famine amendment to the Holocaust studies bill has caused a furor in the New Jersey State Legislature. On December 13 State Sen. Ronald A. Rice introduced an amendment to S-2155 (after it passed in the State Assembly as A-2780), which stated that the genocidal 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine should be added to its list of genocides as part of the state's high school curriculum." The amendment was accepted by a vote of 27-0. Another amendment sponsored by Sen. Randy Corman to include the Polish Katyn genocide was passed 28-0.

The original bill was introduced in September by Assembly Speaker Garabed Haytaian, who is of Armenian descent, and Assemblywoman Harriet Derman, with a proviso that in addition to mandating the teaching of the Nazi Holocaust in the high schools of New Jersey, the Cambodian and Armenian genocides were to be included in the bill.

Jewish organizations, as reported in The Record, New Jersey's second largest newspaper, threatened "to withdraw political support from legislators if they insisted on putting Jewish victims of the Nazis in the same bill with Poles and Ukrainians, who they said suffered atrocities but, they said, also took part in the killing machine as camp guards." Paul Winkler of the state's Commission on Holocaust Education was quoted as saying: "The tragedy of the Holocaust with its victims and survivors is diminished when placed in the same paragraph with other events not as catastrophic as the Nazi systematic planned extermination of a whole nation or ethnic group."

Ultimately, the bill, stripped of its Ukrainian and Polish amendments, failed to reach the floor during the legislature's final session. In March of 1994 during the legislature's new session, another bill mandating the teaching of the Holocaust and other genocides in New Jersey's elementary and secondary schools was passed. The difference was that this bill left open the possibility of studying all genocides, spurring Mr. Bodnar to write that the curriculum bill is "an opportunity to be used."

The final chapter to this episode came in January 1997 when the NJEA Review, the official publication of the New Jersey Education Association, published an article on teaching about genocide. Noted as a resource that can be used by educators in that curriculum was The Ukrainian Weekly's 1983 booklet "The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Unknown Holocaust." In the article, the same Dr. Winkler who had argued against amending the Holocaust curriculum bill, described the Famine as "the planned starvation of a group of people ... [which] happened between 1932 and 1933 when the Soviet Union carried out a policy that led to the starvation of up to 10 million Ukrainian people."

Source: "Famine amendment causes furor over genocide studies bill in N.J." by Walter Bodnar, December 26, 1993, and "The noteworthy: events and people" in "1994: the year in review," December 25, 1994, both in The Ukrainian Weekly; and 1997 report of The Ukrainian Weekly Editor-in-Chief Roma Hadzewycz.

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