News
In Jerusalem, On the Holocaust
For two weeks a group of more than thirty people—Polish and history teachers, museum staffers, Auschwitz Museum guides, and two priests—attended a training course organized by Yad Vashem. This memorial institute in Israel has been commemorating the Destruction of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis during World War II for almost fifty years.
The training sessions in the Jerusalem institute are intended to convey knowledge about the history of the Jews in Europe and in Poland before the Holocaust, and about the tragedy that took place in the Old World from 1939 to 1945. The training also includes highly emotional meetings with Survivors as well as presentations by the participants of the educational programs they use when teaching about the culture of the Jews in Poland and the Holocaust.
The majority of this year's group were graduates of the year-long post-graduate course on "Totalitarianism, Nazism, and the Holocaust" that is organized by the Museum and the Cracow Pedagogical Academy.
Aside from attending lectures, the participants were given the opportunity to visit places held sacred by Christians (Jerusalem and Nazareth) and sites of importance to the Israelis themselves (Massada), as well as to indulge in such purely recreational events as a swim in the Dead Sea or an overnight stay at the En Gev kibbutz combined with a boat ride on the Nazarean lake.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Yad Vashem Institute have now been cooperating for nine years. Groups of teachers travel from Israel to Poland and from Poland to Israel each year. Several hundred educators have taken part so far in the courses organized by the two institutions, which are intended to broaden the teachers' historical knowledge and break down the prejudices that remain on both sides. A great many of the participants acknowledge that this goal has consistently been achieved, which gives rise to the hope that, particularly among young people in both countries, mutual perceptions may be changing.
