“It was the way I learned when I was in school,” says Gotlieb, who teaches Jewish history and the history of the State of Israel to junior and seniors at Manhattan High School for Girls. “The teacher would lecture, and we would have to memorize, memorize, memorize: Boring!”

A former chemist who came to New York City on a sabbatical from her home in Israel, Gotlieb says that when she first gazed upon the Statue of Liberty, she felt “elated,” imagining ancestors who came to Ellis Island out of desperation while still daring to hope.

Gotlieb stayed in New York City and received her master’s degree from Touro’s Graduate School of Jewish Studies. “I credit Touro for taking me from an amateur to a professional Jewish historian, who learned how to identify myths interwoven in the historical narrative and corroborate personal accounts with reputable secondary sources. Touro taught me to do rigorous research,” says  Gotlieb, “so I teach my students in a more intellectual way, focusing on ideas, trends, culture, and always highlighting human nature and patterns that repeat themselves, because human nature doesn’t change. This past October, while teaching about the Crusaders rampaging Jewish homes in the Rhine Valley, I felt as if I was teaching current events, and couldn’t help comparing October 7, 2023, to the massacres of 1096. Last fall’s attack was not ancient history. It reflects world events of today with echoes of Jewish history throughout the ages.”

Gotlieb has always wanted more than academics for her students. She has sought to endow them with a similar experience to the ones she had while hearing stories firsthand from eyewitnesses to history while interviewing for the Spielberg Shoah Foundation and Yad Vashem. And so, she developed a unique curriculum in genealogy, guiding students to record the oral history of their ancestors for posterity.

The Genealogy Project she has designed and directed at the high school of some 200 young women uses expertise she acquired in her own interactions with Holocaust survivors. Gotlieb has also employed the research skills she learned through her Touro training and subsequent experience, to teach the art, science and deep thinking required of a historian.

The central focus of the Genealogy Project is students’ interviews of the oldest member of their families, often a Holocaust survivor. “Some have never before spoken about what they experienced,” Gotlieb says. “It is very moving.”

To help them prepare for the video interview, students meet with their subject for a preliminary session to learn about the milestones in their lives. Then they come up with 50 questions designed to draw out the full life story of the person they’re interviewing, and off they go.

Students submit the recorded interviews to  Gotlieb, who watches every video. “I once heard a grandmother say, ‘Oh, come on! Your teacher will listen to all that?’ Each story is one-of-a-kind, shedding light on that person’s slice of Jewish his-tory.  I only wish someone would have assigned me this project when my grandparents were alive.”

For the next step, students either create documentaries or write essays based on the video interviews. The culmination of the Genealogy Project is an annual event when all the stories are presented. Students curate an exhibition for their families and other visitors, showcasing rare, original artifacts and documents they discovered in the process of researching their subject. The edited essays are collected and published, along with photos and documents.

“Students who interview their ancestors realize that they themselves are the hard-won rewards of the struggles endured and crucial choices made by those who came before them,” explains Gotlieb. “They grasp the enormous responsibility that rests on their shoulders to build a better future for humanity.”