“They drowned one of my sisters in the well in Saleh village,” said Ziyane Rhawi, born in 1908. “Another sister, they buried alive under a pile of stones.”
“My aunt’s two daughters were kidnapped by the Muslims,” recalled Ferida Rhawi, born in 1910. “Even today, one of them is living as a Muslim in Syria.”
These testimonies — recorded from survivors of the Assyrian genocide that began in 1914 — are among the materials included in a new curriculum approved by the Arizona Department of Education for the state’s mandatory genocide education “toolkit.” The curriculum marks the culmination of years of work by Assyrians in the diaspora to educate their communities about the early twentieth-century atrocity.
“A lot of my students, they may have vaguely heard about the Assyrian genocide, but they didn’t really know what it meant,” said Erin Hughes, an assistant professor at Stanislaus State who co-developed the curriculum blueprint. “For most of them, it really is their first time either hearing about it or having the context provided.”
Thanks for reading The Assyrian Journal.
Subscribe for free to receive new posts.
The Assyrian genocide, also known as Seyfo, involved the mass deportation and slaughter of Assyrians beginning in 1914 at the onset of World War I. Ottoman troops and Kurdish militias, allied with Germany, rounded up and killed Assyrians in the regions of Urmia, Persia, and Hakkari — areas located in present-day Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. An estimated 250,000 Assyrians were killed between 1914 and 1918.
In recent years, calls for official recognition have gained traction at the state, national, and international levels. In 2021, the House of Representatives introduced a resolution commemorating the atrocity. In April, France’s Senate passed a resolution urging its government to do the same. Arizona formally recognized the genocide in 2023.
Discussions around creating a genocide curriculum began three years ago, after Arizona enacted a law requiring students to receive instruction on the Holocaust and other genocides at least once in seventh or eighth grade and again during high school social studies.
But the legislation is broad: it doesn’t specify who must teach the content or how long instruction should last. Some teachers cover all genocides in a single day; others devote a week or more.
When the law first passed, Dr. Ramina Jajoo was asked to sign a letter encouraging high schools to embrace genocide education. As president of the Arizona branch of the Seyfo Center, she had already spent years educating state officials and teachers about the genocide. Still, she admitted that developing a full curriculum wasn’t on her mind.
“I didn’t know whether we had the ability to convince the Arizona Department of Education,” she said. “I figured nobody else has done it in any of the other states. I didn’t even know who to approach to write a curriculum. It’s one thing to teach it. Writing a curriculum is another story.”
But the idea lingered. A year later, at a CSU Stanislaus exhibition featuring her grandparents’ clothing and documents, Jajoo met Hughes and Hannibal Travis, a professor at Florida International University and a leading scholar of Assyrian genocide studies with experience developing academic curricula.
Jajoo floated the idea to the pair. Together, they examined Arizona’s 50-plus-page curriculum-approval standards and began researching and compiling survivor stories. Securing family permissions for each testimony and document posed an early challenge.
By 2023, as the first draft neared completion, Jajoo recruited retired high school teacher Kim Klett, who had experience reviewing curriculum materials. The group built a website and submitted the materials to a statewide task force that advises the Department of Education.
The curriculum includes two sample lesson plans, discussion questions such as “What happened to Assyrians after the genocide?” and learning objectives like “Define genocide and understand when it became international law.” The toolkit also features oral histories and video excerpts recorded since 2004.
Jajoo’s own family history is woven throughout. A photo of her grandparents appears on the homepage. Her grandfather is pictured as a member of the Assyrian Levies, a military force once used by the British to patrol the northern frontiers of modern-day Iraq. One lesson plan features a story about her grandmother.
In August, Arizona approved and listed the curriculum as an official resource for high school educators.
“This is setting an example, not just for other states in the U.S. but also globally,” Jajoo said.
The next step is grassroots outreach to encourage teachers and school administrators to use the resources. That outreach will include presentations at state conferences, such as Arizona State University’s Genocide Awareness Week.
Reflecting on her work collecting survivors’ stories, Jajoo offered this message to fellow Assyrians:
“Anybody who thinks their stories don’t matter, they do. Just because they’re not also a writer or journalist, they should still go ahead and write their stories. You just never know.”