News

The grand opening of the Oswiecim synagogue, which belonged to the Chevra Lomdei Mishnayot before the war, was held on September 12.

A statement by the chairman of the International Auschwitz Council in regard to the discotheque at the site of the former tannery (Lederfabrik).

A ceremony marking the conclusion of the second post-graduate course on Totalitarianism, Nazism and the Holocaust was held in the conference room of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum administration building on July 7. University officials, lecturers, course administrators, and Museum research staff joined this year's course graduates in attendance. Prof. Jacek Chrobaczynski had a lecture to mark the end of the course.

In July, the Visitors Services Section organized a two-week seminar on "The Collective Awareness of Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland and Around the World." Participants included 18 staff members and historians from Yad Vashem in Israel and 3 from the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

The International Lesbian and Gay Cultural Network (ILGCN) has awarded the Museum its Orfeo Iris-2000 Human Rights Prize. In it's announcement, the ILGCN stated that the award was made "in honor of those homosexual prisoners who perished in Auschwitz ... and for your museum's printed information mentioning the imprisonment of homosexuals in the Nazi camps, your displaying the prison uniform's pink triangles used by the Nazis to identify homosexuals...."

Results have been announced in the 1999 Museum Event of the Year contest. A jury chaired by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage awarded first prize in the Publication category to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum for "Auschwitz 1940-1945.