Margot Stern Strom, a former schoolteacher who in the mid-1970s turned her dismay over her lack of knowledge about the Holocaust into a nonprofit educational organization that develops anti-hate curriculums for teenagers, died on Tuesday at her home in Brookline, Mass. She was 81.
Her daughter, Rachel Fan Stern Strom, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
Ms. Strom was teaching seventh- and eighth-grade language arts and social studies at the Runkle School in Brookline in 1975 when she and a colleague, Bill Parsons, attended a workshop on the Holocaust. It was an unsettling experience, which made them realize how little they knew about the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews.
She and Mr. Parsons, she was quoted as recalling on the website of Facing History & Ourselves, the organization they went on to found, felt that they had been “victims of the silence on the Holocaust.”
“And now, as teachers,” she added, “we were perpetuating that silence.”
It was the seed for their creation of Facing History, which uses injustices like the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation, apartheid in South Africa and the George Floyd killing to help guide eighth to 12th graders’ understanding of the motivations behind racism, extremism and antisemitism, as well as their moral implications and the power of people to shape history’s course.
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