Lublin webinar – May 22+29, 2020

This seminar was supported by the Visegrad fund and the Federal Foreign Office of Germany.

On May 22 & May 29, 2020 we conducted our first webinar on „How to teach 20th century Polish Jewish history: connecting Polish students & teachers with their heritage, and with their neighbors“ that brought together 77 teachers from six countries (we reached an additional 433 people via our Facebook livestream), and we were thrilled with how our Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, Moldovan, Slovak, and Hungarian teachers fed off each other’s energy, shared ideas, and even had some brilliant young students electrify us with presentations.

As a pre-webinar assignment, we asked participants to watch the Centropa film „So that memory doesn’t die“ about Teofila Silberring, a Holocaust survivor from Krakow. In an engaging Q&A session, Jurek Silberring, Teofila Silberring‘s son, joined us from Krakow to speak to our participants and answer their questions.

We had several speakers from Poland, Ukraine, and Moldova, all of whom presented innovative educational projects on Jewish history:

Our local partner from Lublin, Brama Grodzka – Teatr NN, offered three presentations during the webinar on their projects „Lublin. Memory of the Place“, „Letters to Henio“ and „Atlas of Memory Maps“ project.

We offered short presentations by our most innovative classroom teachers. For our online Marketplace of Ideas session, we invited teachers to present best-practice projects. Jacek Jaros, a history teacher in Kielce, spoke about how his students used Centropa´s database and built their own multilingual online tool called „Comphoty“ which combines old and new photographs. Anastasiia Belyaeva, an English teacher from Zaporizhia, Ukraine, presented her lesson plans on how she used Centropa´s film „Return to Rivne“ with her university students. Krystian Kazimierczuk, a history teacher in Chorzow, used our Silberring film to teach the Holocaust in a personal, meaningful way.

Last but not least, the winning students of the Trans.History Youth Competition 2019/20, Jan Chorągiewicz from Poland and Valeria Rosior, Alisa Sadovnicov and Ilia Vivici from Moldova presented their projects to the 77 participants – in English, and with great confidence.

For more details, please take a look at our webinar report (PDF, in English)

Grapic Recordings by Ola Krawczyk