Each year Forum for Dialogue announces three grant and scholarship competitions for Leaders of Dialogue planning to commemorate Jewish heritage of their towns and popularize knowledge about local Jewish history. Selected projects receive financial support from the Forum. We are happy to announce the results of the awarded projects realized despite the limitations imposed by the current pandemic.
Justyna Biernat developed a bilingual guidebook of the Tomaszów Mazowiecki ghetto, Black Silhouettes, which explores the topography and history of the ghetto. It presents key locations for the functioning of the prewar community and later ghetto, a detailed annotated map of the area, photographs, and testimonies collected at that time of the war. The guidebook has been also supplied with Survivors’ testimonies, archival photographs, and overviews of key figures of the prewar and wartime Jewish life of Tomaszów. The online launch of the publication was a talk about Tomaszów ghetto addressed to local teachers, activists, curators, librarians, and history buffs. It offered participants an opportunity to get more information about the guidebook and its accompanying educational tools. The publication will be made available at the Tourist Information Office in Tomaszów Mazowiecki.
Dariusz Popiela received funds to continue his “People, Not Numbers” project, this time in Czarny Dunajec, within which he honors local Holocaust victims by carving all their names on a commemorative monument placed at a local Jewish cemetery. He has completed this project already in Grybów and Krościenko. A group of his aids has cleaned up and fenced the cemetery area. They also discovered two mass graves, which they immediately preserved, and planned to renovate tombstones found outside of the cemetery. The projects key element is the commemoration of the 494 victims of the Shoah, Jewish residents of Czarny Dunajec, as well as the victims of a nearby labor camp. The commemorative plaque with all their names have been placed at a cemetery used by the Jewish community since mid-19th century. A ceremony was held for people involved in the project as well as local residents where the names of all the victims was read out laud to honor their memory. The idea behind the project is to reflect the scale of the Holocaust by replacing numbers with individual names of these killed as this ensures more empathy towards the victims and their fate. The project gathered numerous allies, including a Leader of Dialogue Karolina Panz. We encourage you to view a film by Wojciech Szumowski documenting the project.
Anna Brzyska, a Leader from Brzesko, set herself the task to commemorate the grave of a Jewish family killed in 1944 in the nearby Brzezina village. At a forest dividing Brzeżnica and Poręba Spytkowska a ceremony was held to unveil a monument placed in their honor. The monument has the following inscription: “Here remain the bodies of parents and two children murdered in 1944 during the Holocaust just because they were Jews. We do not know their names and where they came from. We know that they were hiding nearby for a long time, until they were discovered and shared the fate of other Jews in this tragedy of hate and cruelty that marks this time in history. Let us pray for their souls and for the hate never to return.” The ceremony included also the honoring of memory of other Jews, who died in the Brzesko county in similar cicumstanced. The people gathered, including a local priest and the Krakow Rabbi, Elizer Gurary, shared a prayerfor their souls. “I hope that this memory and the memory of what happened here 76 years ago will become an important part of local history,” wrote Anna Brzyska after the event.
Program supported by the Ledor Wador Foundation.
