Three week-long seminars on three different levels, called “universities”, focus on a new topic with middle and high school teachers every year. The level 2 university will take place in Poland and level 3 in Israel.
SUMMER UNIVERSITY IN POLAND (LEVEL 2)
August 21 to 28, 2016
Before the Second World War, Poland had Europe’s biggest Jewish community (10% of the country’s population). The Nazis implemented their biggest killing operation on this territory occupied by the Wehrmacht from September 1939, creating six extermination centers to which transports brought Jews from all over Europe. In less than a year, from March 1942 to February 1943, Polish Judaism was wiped out (three million dead in all during the war). Those who somehow managed to survive were victims of pogroms from 1945 to 1947 and an outbreak of anti-Semitism in 1968.
The Communist regime buried the past under patriotic anti-Fascist discourse and imposed silence, but a veritable re-appropriation of history has been possible since the 1990s. With the advent of democracy and membership in the European Union, interest in the Second World War period is growing in Poland. Historical research is free, open and productive. Discussions about the past are lively, but so are conservative reactions.
This annual training session in Poland is offered to teachers who have already taken the summer university course in Paris. It includes visits to the main sites of prewar Jewish life and the places of extermination. The participants will meet with Poles involved in the work of making reparations for the past and with members of Poland’s new Jewish community.
AUTUMN UNIVERSITY IN ISRAEL (LEVEL 3)
October 25 to November 1, 2016
Visiting institutions that transmit the history of the Holocaust and meeting specialists are two ways to help teachers think about educational methods and the evolution of knowledge. Tours of Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus quarter, a visit to the Memorial of Jewish Deportees from France in Roglit and discussions with former Jewish Resistance members, former hidden children and deportees’ children add a human dimension. The attitude of Israel’s Arab minority to the Holocaust is also examined
For primary school teachers
Three days of lectures and workshops help primary school teachers think about ways of relating the history of the Holocaust to the contemporary issues of social cohesion and living together.
AUTUMN UNIVERSITY IN BERLIN (LEVEL 4)
October 23 to 29, 2016
Some of Germany’s greatest writers, artists and intellectuals were Jewish. Like the overwhelming majority of the country’s Jews in the early 20th century, they felt a deep sense of belonging to the German nation, its history and its culture. Thousands gave their lives defending the Reich and the Kaiser on First World War battlefields. Nazism severed this bond between Germany and the Jews.