Tennessee Holocaust Commission has awarded Robertsville Middle School’s Dr. Julie Kinder-McMillan one of four 2022 Belz-Lipman Awards for Excellence in Holocaust Education. Dr. Kinder-McMillan teaches 8th Grade English and Language Arts at RMS. As one of the four recipients of this award, she will will receive a $1,500 scholarship. These funds can be used to develop new curriculum, attend trainings and purchase resources to help further engage their students in the study of the Holocaust. The virtual award ceremony for the Belz-Lipman Award took place on May 15, 2022, during the Holocaust Commission’s Annual Day of Remembrance Holocaust Commemoration.
Dr. Kinder-McMillan incorporates Holocaust memoirs and history into an interdisciplinary PBL study each spring. In 2000 and 2014, Julie trained under scholars at the USHMM in Washington, D.C. She previously won the Belz-Lipman Award in 2013 and has served as a Teacher Fellow with the THC since that time. She chaired the Holocaust Education Conference co-sponsored by the THC and Oak Ridge Schools in 2019. She has co-facilitated the Mira Kimmelman Holocaust Study Group for adults in the Oak Ridge community since 2019 and is honored to be working with the Kimmelman family to carry forward the legacy of the late Mira Kimmelman, a Holocaust survivor and speaker who made her home in Oak Ridge. Julie is inspired by Mira’s words from her memoir Echoes from the Holocaust: “Only by remembering the bitter lessons of Hitler’s legacy can we hope it will never be repeated. Teach it, tell it, read it.”
