Since 2012 Forum for Dialogue has been cooperating with one of US’s most important educational organizations, Facing History and Ourselves. Founded in 1976 in Boston, FHAO aims to work for a better, more open and just society by fighting xenophobia, anti-Semitism and other discrimination. FHAO works with teachers, helping them use history, social sciences and psychology to help their students become ethical human beings capable of critical thinking.

Initiating our cooperation, the Forum team took part in program consultations with Facing History and Ourselves in 2012. In 2014, we had an opportunity to help plan a visit to Poland for Facing History staff and board members, who got to meet students of five School of Dialogue schools. In 2016 Forum representatives were invited to the annul seminar on teaching about the Holocaust organized in Brookline, MA and New York. So far the most important element of our cooperation, started four years ago, have been annual study visits organized by the Forum for Jewish-American teachers working with Facing History and Ourselves. The week-long program focuses on the past and present of Polish/Jewish relations. The experience gathered in Poland is later used by the teachers in their classes devoted to teaching about the Holocaust, Jewish identity or Judaism.

For most Facing History participants, this visit is their first time in Poland. The week spent with the Forum in Poland is an opportunity to examine various ideas and notions they may have in a new way. The visit, which is often a very moving personal experience, impacts the way the teachers structure and teach their classes. The participants are obliged to use some of the knowledge gained in Poland in their work with students, but it is up to them what they will chose and how. The class may concern the post-1989 transformation, Polish literature, memory, the Holocaust, Yiddish writers and their connections to Poland, or the Warsaw Uprising. In this way, the visit affects the work of teachers who take part in the program.

I feel privileged to be part of the Forum team through Facing History and intent to use my new found learning to design a different and more nuanced trip to Poland for my students – one that engages the narratives that we explored this week.

Shoshanah Zaritt, head of Junior and Senior Programs, Gann Academy in Waltham, Massachusetts