A Visit of Study Trip Participants

December 2016

In December 2016, a group of Israeli and American participants of the Study Trip to Poland met with students from Vocational School Complex No. 2 in Skierniewice. The meeting began with a “speed dating” exercise which helped everyone to quickly get to know each other. Next was a walking tour which included the most important sites of everyday life of the prewar Jewish community in Skierniewice.

When the group came back to the school building, they enjoyed a treat, which turned out to be a great opportunity for casual conversations and perfect summary of the meeting, allowing the students and the participants talk about the present day and cherish new connections.

More about the meeting in Skierniewice in the following video:

Read more about the School of Dialogue at Józef Paczkowski Vocational School Complex No 2

A Visit of the Jewish Museum of Australia Goup and Marcin Grynberg

June 2017

In June 2017, a group from the Jewish Museum of Australia visited the School of Dialogue alumni from Stefan Czarniecki High School in Kozienice. The group was accompanied by Marcin Grynberg, a descendant of Kozienice Jews. As he said before the meeting: “When I found out that Forum is coming to Kozienice, I knew that I was going to meet experts, the young people who searched all over the place and found out different things”.

After a warm welcome, speeches by representatives of local authorities, including the mayor of Kozienice, and premilinary icebreaker activities, the students took their guest on a walking tour around Jewish Kozienice they prepared as part of the School of Dialogue program. The community of Kozienice welcomed the guests with open arms, helping them reconnect with their ancestors.

For more watch the film made from the meeting:

Read more about the School of Dialogue at Stefan Czarniecki High School No.1

In June 2014 an amazing meeting took place during the conducting School of Dialogue program in Nasielsk. Students participating in the project connected via Skype with Maurice Chandler, Holocaust Survivor, and Glenn Kurtz, author of the book “Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film”. In October 2014, Glenn Kurtz visited high school in Nasielsk with the group of Survivors and descendants of Nasielsk Jews. These events had huge impact on local community’s attitude towards the Nasielsk’s Jewish heritage, as Glenn Kurtz shared with us:

“In 2014, the Forum for Dialogue held a “School of Dialogue” with students at the high school in Nasielsk, Poland. At that time, I had been conducting research about the town for two years. My grandfather, David Kurtz, was born in Nasielsk in 1888. After emigrating to the United States as a small child with his family in the 1890s, my grandfather returned to visit his birthplace in the summer of 1938.

On this trip, my grandfather brought a home movie camera, and he captured three minutes of footage of the Jewish community of Nasielsk: excited children shouting and waving; hundreds of townspeople exiting the synagogue after a special ceremony. One year later, Nasielsk was overrun by the German army. Of Nasielsk’s 3,000 Jews, fewer than one hundred survived the Holocaust. My grandfather’s film contains the only known moving pictures of this lost community. My research focused on identifying the individuals in these haunting images.

The School of Dialogue presented an extraordinary opportunity to bring the history and fate of Nasielsk’s Jewish citizens back into the town’s consciousness, and to make this history real and personal for the students. Working with the Forum’s vibrant and expert team, we arranged for the students to spend a day speaking via Skype with a survivor I had found during my research, one of the excited children who appeared in my grandfather’s 1938 film. This survivor, by then 89 years old, was only 16 years old when he escaped the Warsaw Ghetto—the same age as the students who participated in the School of Dialogue in 2014. Sharing his recollections of growing up in Nasielsk, and recounting the chilling and powerful story of how he survived the war by passing as a Roman Catholic Pole, this survivor helped the students grasp the real-life experience of the history they were studying.

The lessons of the School for Dialogue continue to make a difference in present-day Nasielsk. In the summer of 2016— and we anticipate again in the summer of 2017—a multi-national, multi-faith group of volunteers began work to reclaim and rededicate Nasielsk’s Jewish cemetery. Alumni of the School for Dialogue, along with current high school students, town officials, and ordinary members of the local community, are all participating as we clear away the years of neglect—the weeds and bushes, as well as the bitterness and mutual misunderstandings—to bring this ground, and consequently, the 400-year history of Nasielsk’s Jewish community, back into the light. The School of Dialogue marked a turning point in the lives of these students and in the collective consciousness of the town itself.”

Read more about the School of Dialogue at Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz High School 

When borders between Poland and the Western world reopened after 1989, followed by the reestablishment of  diplomatic ties between Poland and Israel, great numbers of Jews young and old started coming to Poland, looking for a connection with the country that for many was the land of their ancestors. Poland was and remains important for many Jews if not because of a personal connection than because it was the site of the Holocaust.

These journeys to Poland were and are very challenging and emotionally demanding, and have been the subject of numerous publications, films or plays. These accounts often depict the miscommunications and alienation the visitors feel when searching for clues about where they came from and what has happened to those members of the family who stayed in Poland, or when seeing what has happened to whatever traces remaining of a once vibrant Jewish community.

At the same time, since the fall of Communism and the newly opened possibilities of a democratic state, after decades of the “Communist freeze” on all things connected to Polish/Jewish past, Poles have begun grappling with their complicated history. Realizing just how much of the shared Polish/Jewish history was simply removed from the collective memory of the population, they also strive to reconnect with the Poland of the past.

Aware that an important link was almost severed between Poland and its Jews, non-Jewish Poles work hard to bring back and keep the memory of the Jews who perished and embrace the Jewish community that is alive: both the small Jewish community in Poland and the larger community abroad.

Since the Polish Jewish community is relatively small in an almost 40 million society, most of the people dedicated to the restoration and preservation of the memory of Polish Jews in Poland rarely have an opportunity to meet a Jew. They spend hours learning about personal stories of Jews who lived in their towns many decades ago, but have never talked with a person who identifies as Jewish.

Forum recognizes that a real and meaningful reconnection between people must happen during face-to-face encounters. This is why since 2010 we have been organizing meetings between Jewish visitors to Poland and participants of our programs in Poland: the School of Dialogue students and Leaders of Dialogue. Our experience is that for both groups these meetings are important stepping stones in rebuilding connections and starting a dialogue. The students and the Leaders feel reinforced when their work is appreciated and recognized as important, the visitors are grateful that there exist a community of people in Poland invested in preserving the memory of Jews alive.

Forum’s School of Dialogue students and Leaders of Dialogue go to great pains to learn about and preserve what is left of the Jewish communities of their small towns, but they rarely have an opportunity to interact with representatives of contemporary Jewish community. It is important that these people, dedicated to the Jews of the past, meet Jews of the present. The Jews who come to Poland often do not have a chance to talk with the residents of Poland, focused on a usually demanding itinerary, but their image of contemporary Poland is incomplete without contacting people on the ground. That is why, since 2010 Forum has been organizing Meetings between participants of our programs in Poland and Jewish visitors from abroad, often with familial connections to Poland. Thanks to these meetings the students and the Leaders see that people with an investment in Jewish history of Poland recognize and value their efforts, while the visitors have interested and sympathetic guides to navigate the often-alien landscape of contemporary Poland.

List of places

Contributors

The program is co-financed by Malka and Pinek Krystal Scholarship Fund.

Olga Kaczmarek, Director of International Relations at the Forum, participated in the 2016 Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education, taking place at the Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA. This year’s conference is focused on women and their experiences in the Holocaust. The conference has ended with a presentation of the achievements of the School of Dialogue program.

A lot is going on in Ulanów, where Forum’s friend Cheryl Fishbein works together with Leader of Dialogue Janusz Dąbek and Jolanta Nicałek in the Dziedzictwo Foundation they have set up together. On March 12,  the local Museum, largely devoted to the Jews of Ulanów and run by Janusz Dąbek received a visit from the Polish Ombudsman Adam Bodnar. And at the same time the authorities of the region have taken decisive action to clean and fence the Jewish cemetery in Ulanów.

On February 24, Polish Friends of the Forum met with professor Adam Daniel Rotfeld. Prof.Rotfeld, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs, is a diplomat and an expert in the field of international relations. For many years he has been involved in the Polish Institute of International Affairs. He was elected Director of Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and Co-Chairman of Polish-Russian Group on Difficult Matters – it is hard to list all the professional activities undertaken by Prof. Rotfeld. During the meeting, Prof. Rotfeld shared reflections on today’s international situation, present condition of the European Union and the role of diplomacy in shaping the image of Poland. He underlined the importance of the work of Forum for Dialogue and thanked the members of the Polish Friends of the Forum for our joint efforts. We are grateful for this wonderful meeting!