Proclaiming Justice with Laurie Cardoza Moore

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Laurie Cardoza Moore: Did we protect the Jews? She yelled at me, raised her voice—she'd never done that before. She said, "That is the past, and we will not discuss it." I never asked her again. That has stuck with me all my life, and it was the impetus behind producing a documentary on the Holocaust called *The Forgotten People: Christianity and the Holocaust*.

I'm Laurie Cardoza Moore, and this is *Proclaiming Justice* podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, now I have with me two Holocaust experts. As you all know, being with PJTN, the Holocaust is one of the most important points of our history and the work that we do at PJTN. It's telling the story of the six million voices that were silenced by the Nazis in Europe.

I have with me Rabbi Michael Beo and Dr. Simon Young, who are both with Six Million Voices. Thank you both so much for being with me. As I said in the intro, the Holocaust has always intrigued me. I remember being in high school and grew up in South Florida, and we were learning about the Holocaust. It was a segment of our history that we were learning.

I was horrified by what I saw, the images I saw, what I learned. Before that, I had no idea. But I went home, I went to my grandmother's house because my grandmother was German. My great-grandparents came from Germany. I asked my grandmother, "Nana, I just finished doing a series on the Holocaust at school." I said, "What did our family do to protect the Jews? Did we protect the Jews?"

She yelled at me, raised her voice—she'd never done that before. She said, "That is the past, and we will not discuss it." I never asked her again. That has stuck with me all my life, and it was the impetus behind producing a documentary on the Holocaust called *The Forgotten People: Christianity and the Holocaust*.

What did the Christians do to help the Jews? Why was the church silent? Why were there just—I know Yad Vashem recognizes 23,000 Righteous Gentiles, but why were they silent? Why didn't they speak up? After I started to ask those questions, then I asked myself if the Holocaust of six million Jews and another five and a half million other people could be murdered in a progressive, educated, wealthy country like Germany—Judeo-Christian, it was Jews and Christians in Germany—could it happen here in the United States? We are very similar to who Germany was back then. Tell us about Six Million Voices.

Rabbi Michael Beo: First of all, thank you very much for inviting us. It's an honor and a pleasure to be here and talk to you. I am a grandson of Holocaust survivors. So when you started telling your experience, I immediately understood exactly where you come from and what you're talking about.

Six Million Voices comes exactly from that point of view. How can we tell the story of six million voices in a way that resonates with today's student? Students are both high school students all the way to adults. So many people today—we know from statistics and polls—so many people don't know what a Holocaust was. They don't know even the word Auschwitz lost meaning.

So we have created a platform and a content creation process that allows us to create museum-grade level of visual-audio interactive experiences that takes the user, the participant, inside the story so that they can understand better than just watching passively a movie. Movies are wonderful, documentaries are wonderful, but we have moved to a generation that the kids want to be engaged, they want to be active, and their attention span is small. So that's where we come. We create those experiences for them.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: That's fantastic. Dr. Young, tell us about your involvement.

Dr. Simon Young: Michael and I have been working together for several years now. I am an archaeologist by trade. I'm a Greek and Roman archaeologist, and during my PhD, I developed a system to transform traditional research of places that have disappeared into 360-degree reconstructions of how things used to be.

Using our expertise with Michael's vision of Holocaust education, we recreate environments that have been lost in high definition to capture the imagination of today's screen-focused audiences.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: So you're really just leveraging the technology we have available now to make it come to life in the classroom or in any setting. Tell us about your outreach. Are you working in public schools? Tell us about that.

Rabbi Michael Beo: We started with telling the story of Auschwitz live. The platform allows also for live presentations. So the teacher or an historian or Holocaust expert is live while he showcases the entire presentation that combines pictures and videos. As of today, we've reached over 350,000 individuals across the United States, as well as about 70,000 high school students from hundreds of public, private, and charter schools.

Many states have mandatory Holocaust education, but the teachers are not Holocaust experts. So they don't have the tools to teach Holocaust education in a meaningful way. That's where we come. One of the things that we provide is that the audio-visual engagement is exactly that. It pulls in the student from multiple points of view.

Therefore, it's not reading a book that it's flat. It's not only watching a video. It's watching a video that is interactive. It's hearing a professor or a teacher talk about something and showing you what it was and what is not anymore. By doing that, we were able to start Six Million Voices, and then we created Kristallnacht, a full, wonderful presentation about Kristallnacht.

Part of what Dr. Simon's team was able to reconstruct is those synagogues that were destroyed. Now we can see how they were and what happened to them. The same thing we did with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The entire Warsaw Ghetto doesn't exist anymore. The streets don't exist anymore. The buildings don't exist. We have rebuilt them. We can offer a walk-through those streets, hearing the noise of people walking in the street, seeing the city, so that we can experience Jewish life before the war.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Yeah, that's a problem.

Rabbi Michael Beo: It's hearing a professor or a teacher talk about something and showing you what it was and what is not anymore. By doing that, we were able to start Six Million Voices, and then we created Kristallnacht, a full, wonderful presentation about Kristallnacht.

So part of what Dr. Simon's team was able to reconstruct is those synagogues that were destroyed. Now we can see how they were and what happened to them. The same thing we did with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The entire Warsaw Ghetto doesn't exist anymore. The streets don't exist anymore. The buildings don't exist. We have rebuilt them. We can offer a walk-through those streets, hearing the noise of people walking in the street, seeing the city, so that we can experience Jewish life before the war.

Dr. Simon Young: I would add that the reconstructions we create are such high definition, photo-realistic environments that it makes it so relevant to audiences today. Rather than looking at a black-and-white faded photograph of a Warsaw city street, we are immersed in it. You're in it. You're walking down the street. It feels real when you're seeing it. It's almost indistinguishable from a photograph taken by a smartphone.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: That is amazing. So what technology do you use? Do they wear the VR?

Rabbi Michael Beo: No, that's the beauty of it. It's no VR. VR is amazing, it works for those who it works, but for a lot of people, VR can be complex, complicated, and it's difficult to scale it because not every person has a VR in their home, not every school has VR for all the students.

We do it without VR, without an app. It's a link. So you can access it with any browser-capable device. It's ready also if in the future we're going to walk around with XR glasses. It's going to work on that as well. So it's cross-device, and it really gives you that extra layer of immersiveness.

The beauty of the platform is that it allows us to come to NRB and to talk to organizations that want to tell their stories. There's so many stories that are based upon the Bible, the Torah, that are common to a Christian audience and to the Jewish world. We can tell those stories and bring them alive. We can tell the story of places in Israel and the Holy Land. We can show how the Temple existed and what it was from the Jebusite city of Jerusalem all the way to today. We can tell the story of Masada, Caesarea, Sepphoris, and where did Jesus walk, and really immerse people in those stories and make them come alive.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: That's brilliant because a lot of people aren't going to have the opportunity of going to Israel, although ideally, that would be what we would want people to do—go and walk the land, smell, taste, feel. But we don't have that luxury. So what is the response from people who have done this interactive program?

Rabbi Michael Beo: The response has been really, really encouraging and amazing. That is the reason that we are continuing to invest in the technology and in creating stories because the response is so awesome. We see that there is a real need. Organizations want to tell a story. They don't know exactly where to start and how to do it.

We want to tell their stories as well, and we want to help them tell their stories. We want to continue telling the story of the Holocaust, but the story of the Jewish people doesn't start and end in the Holocaust. It starts with Abraham and continues until today, and it will continue for the next thousands of years.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: That's right. You have so much great content using the Bible to bring these truths alive. And events like the Holocaust and the Inquisition—the Inquisition is front and center our next documentary film that we're working on finishing, *The Lost Jews of the Inquisition*, to find the people that lost their identity over centuries.

Rabbi Michael Beo: Part of what we've been able to do with the processes that we created is we can work with your content. So we can take anybody's content because organizations invest a lot of effort and the resources to create the visuals they have to tell their stories. Great. I can use your visuals, augmented by ours, and we can create an additional medium how to experience your story.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Now you're talking my language. I've got plenty of content to share.

Rabbi Michael Beo: Right. So we can take and work with your content and make it interactive.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: That's fantastic. Before we wrap up this interview, is there anything else that you want us to know, to share with our audience, Dr. Young?

Dr. Simon Young: I would say that we've been talking a lot about this incredible visual experience. It's really something you need to see to understand. The 360 panoramas that you can explore—it's a visual medium for telling compelling, engaging stories. You need to see it to understand.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: I can't wait. Sign me up. Where can I see it? When?

Rabbi Michael Beo: Sixmillionvoices.org.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoy this interview. How can they learn more about what you're doing?

Rabbi Michael Beo: Sixmillionvoices.org. You can send us an email, you can contact us through the website, and we would love to share your stories and our stories and how we can share the truth and justice to the world.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Amen. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us today. If you're a teacher or a homeschool mom or a Sunday school teacher, you have an audience that this program, this technology, is perfect for. Thank you very much for having us.

Thank you again for joining me on this edition of *Proclaiming Justice*. Please share this podcast with your family and friends. For more information about how you can get involved, please visit our website at pjtn.org. As a PJTN watcher, you can help us keep up the fight to preserve our freedom for our children and their children for such a time as this.