News
Summer School Students Visit Auschwitz Site
The Museum played host for a day to students from the Holocaust Teaching Summer School, held in Cracow from July 3-7 and designed to provide interested teachers with additional knowledge of the subject.
"It would be unthinkable if a Summer School intended to increase people's knowledge of the Holocaust did not include a visit to the Museum," said Alicja Białecka of the International Center for Teaching about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. "During their study day, the teachers toured the sites of the Auschwitz I and Birkenau camps, learned about preservation work and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum collections, and visited the Roma, French, Dutch, and Hungarian national exhibitions."
Participants attended a lecture by Dr. Henryk Świebocki on What the World Knew about the Holocaust, a presentation on teaching at memorial sites, and another presentation about the educational offerings of and possibilities for cooperation with the ICEAH. They also visited the Center for Dialogue and Prayer and the Jewish Center. Cooperation between the ICEAH and the National Remembrance Institute also made it possible to meet with Wiesława Młynarczyk, who presented the Institute's educational offerings.
"This is the first such trilateral American-Israeli-Polish project," said its organizer, Dr. Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs of the UJ European Studies Institute and the ICEAH. "This is the first summer school, but, in view of the motivation and expectations of the teachers, we plan to make it a regular occurrence. Almost 350 teachers applied from all over Poland. We could accept only 60, so we selected them on a regional basis, mainly from Małopolska. There was also a large group of teachers who, even though they have already completed the Holocaust studies course organized by the Auschwitz Museum, wanted further to enhance their knowledge. A separate educational program will be designed to meet their needs."
Dr. Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs said that organizing the School would not have been possible without the help and support of Tess Wise, head of the board of The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida. Tess Wise, a survivor of the Radom ghetto, is a great-granddaughter of the Head Rabbi of Warsaw in the 1920s, Avraham Zwi Perelmutter, who was the first Jewish member of the Polish Sejm (parliament) after the country regained its independence. During the inauguration of the Summer School, Tess Wise said, "My roots are here, and that's why I'm here."
Invited lecturers included university faculty and experts from the USA, Israel, and Poland, including Professor Michael Berenbaum, Dr. Franciszek Piper, Dr. Henryk Świebocki, Professor Feliks Tych, Professor Zdzisław Mach, Robert Szuchta, Dr. Piotr Trojański, Dr. Gideon Greif, Dr. Havi Ben Sasson, Dr. Marcie Littell, Krystyna Oleksy, and Mitchell Bloomer.
Aside from the founder and main sponsor of the program (the educational center from the USA mentioned above), other co-organizers of the project include the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, the UJ European Studies Institute, the Galicia Jewish Museum in Cracow, and the ICEAH.
