| 2018 |
Chełm
Bolesław Wirski Junior High School No. 8
Bolesław Wirski Junior High School No. 8
| 2018 |
Chełm, Lubelskie voivodeship’s third largest town, boasts a fascinating history that played out at the intersection of Polish, Jewish and Ruthenian cultures. Junior high school students from Chełm’s Elementary School no. 8 put in a lot of effort to uncover signs left by the town’s Jewish residents.
Prior to World War II, Jews comprised half of Chełm’s population. As a result of wartime destruction and the horrors of the Shoah, most tenement houses, shops and merchant stands in the Jewish district had been obliterated. Only the Small Synagogue (Beit ha-Midrash), a forlorn Jewish cemetery and a handful of buildings remembering their prewar Jewish inhabitants and Jewish institutions still stand.
School of Dialogue workshops inspired young Chełm residents to undertake – often very innovative – activities that would help the town restore its memory of its former Jewish inhabitants. The historical Jewish walking tour drew an audience of not only High School No.1 students, but also 30-odd group of passersby, who were interested to hear what project participants had to say about the synagogue, the former Jewish library, Chełm’s Jewish volunteer soldiers who died fighting for Poland against the Soviets in 1920 and other traces of the no-longer-existent prewar Jewish shtetl.
Fueled by the workshops and group project work, participants exercised their creativity by adding a staged storytelling element to their tour about Chełm’s rabbi Elijah and the golem he had created. In an attempt to record their historical and archival findings, students created a film about the town’s Jewish history and a Padlet site containing all collected and edited resources (including QR codes generated for the purposes of the walking tour) as well as reports and photos from School of Dialogue project execution.
Activities did not concentrate just on the educational walk – project participants organized an open academic session „This is my fellow countryman” [“Ten jest z Ojczyzny mojej”, quote of a book title by Władysław Bartoszewski], joined POLIN Museum’s Warsaw Ghetto Uprising anniversary commemorations through the “Daffodils” happening as well as participated in commemorating the 75th anniversary of Szmul Zygielbojm’s death.
Additionally, they volunteered to conduct cleanup works at the Jewish cemetery and – inspired by a descendant of a Chełm Jew who had placed a family headstone in an upright position – decided to place another headstone in the intended upright position.
The School of Dialogue project – supported not only by the students’ homeroom teacher, but also by the school’s principal, local activist Mariusz Klimczak, Ms.Dorota Bida from Chełm’s Regional Museum and the municipality – seems to be just the beginning for its participants. In the course of their work, students collaborated with their peers in higher grades, many developed a deeper interest in the topic, which led to a number of ideas and plans for opportunities to continue working in this subject matter.
In their work, High School No.8 students used words from Władysław Szlengel’s poem “Rzeczy” [Things] as credo to have the eponymous objects once again “leave trunks and boxes” and appear once more, as they had done before, on the streets of Chełm.
I like very much the idea of making people aware of the history of Jews associated with their city, because a significant part of society judges not only Jews, but generally national minorities, by imposed stereotypes. It is worth having an opportunity to learn everything from a different angle. It gives you a chance to make your own and independent opinion.
Workshops participant
School: Junior High School No. 8 at Zygmunt Wirski Elementary School No. 8
Students: 2nd year
Teacher: Marzena Boćwińska
Educators: Antonina Stasiuk, Katarzyna Winiarska
Projekt sfinansowany ze środków Friends of the Forum, Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany oraz darowizn od osób prywatnych i instytucji wspierających Forum Dialogu w Polsce i za granicą.
Dziękujemy Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) za wsparcie programu edukacyjnego Szkoła Dialogu. Poprzez restytucję mienia ofiar Holokaustu, Claims Conference wspiera organizacje na całym świecie w działaniach edukacyjnych na temat Holokaustu oraz na rzecz zachowania pamięci o ofiarach Zagłady.
