VU identified this area of Israeli life and education as requiring vision due to the complex predicaments and opportunities that have emerged from the centrality of Holocaust memory in Israeli identity and from the obligatory study of history in the formal educational system.
 
In order to address these complexities, VU recruited Chava Sagiv as its director in this area and benefited from collaboration with two leading experts: Professor Sam Wineburg of Stanford University, who is also a consultant to the MLI and a member of its academic board and Dr. Zeev Mankowitz of the Hebrew University’s Melton Center for Jewish Education.
 
Initial development in this area produced a conference for seventy of Israel’s leading history educators, various consultations to the Ministry of Education’s history education department, initiatives towards a VU newsletter for Israeli history educators and the development of “follow up” learning activities for Israelis returning from trips to Poland. These activities were generated various lectures, papers and protocols.  However, development in this area was temporarily delayed, so as to enable VU to complete its activities in the other areas and to focus more on infusion of its work into MLI programs.