The Evolution Of Moral Atiitudes Towards Holocaust Moral Dilemmas

Abstract

Six million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis during World War II. This is known as the Jewish Holocaust. The Israeli Ministry of Education began to teach the issue of Holocaust in the early 1950s and continues to do so until today. This paper presents significant results regarding the evolution of Israeli high-school students' moral attitudes towards different strategies employed by Jews to cope with moral dilemmas that occurred during the Holocaust. The aim of this research was to test whether a Holocaust Learning Program generated changes in the participant's moral attitudes. 102 male and female students in three Israeli high-schools, responded to a Moral Attitudes Questionnaire over three research stages at three points of time during their studies in the Holocaust Learning Program at school. The results revealed that in the evolution of participants' moral attitudes towards Holocaust era dilemmas there was a non-significant increase in the level of participants’ agreement with survival moral solutions and a significant decrease in the level of their agreement with deontological moral solutions in all three dilemmas categories. These results lead to two initial conclusions: the first conclusion is that the learning process is the main cause for these developments. The second conclusion is that it is easier to decrease the level of agreement with deontological moral solutions than to increase the level of agreement with survival moral solutions.