School of Dialogue at Józef Piłsudski Public Elementary School

| 2019 |

Sixth graders from Gidle’s Elementary School faced a challenging task. This small town near Radomsko has no Jewish heritage sites whatsoever. Few archival sources mention anything about the local Jewish population. Despite all this, students were able to collect information from those who still remembered Gidle’s Jews and establish locations of no-longer-existing buildings important for the community. Henryk Łęgonik was one of the seniors who shared what he remembered of Jewish Gidle with the students and helped them imagine what their town had once been like. The students were not aware that Gidle had once had a Jewish community.

At each stage of the project, students opted for independent work, gathering relevant information and organizing a walking tour all by themselves.

Their tour, containing elements of a location-based game, was designed with the town’s residents in mind. It gave the students an opportunity to not only share what they had learned about local history, but also to explore local sites of interest, such as a century-old oak tree growing in the main square. The Jewish cemetery in the neighboring town of Zagórze was also included in the itinerary, as tour organizers had been conducting cleanup works there from the very beginning of the School of Dialogue project.

Photos: S. Niemojewski, A. Wołowski

Gidle

School: Józef Piłsudski Public Elementary School
Students: 6th year
Teacher: Joanna Niedźwiecka
Educators: Stanisław Niemojewski, Antek Wołowski

Contributors

Project cofinanced thanks to the generosity of Friends of the Forum, Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and individual donors and institutions from Poland and abroad supporting Forum for Dialogue.

In appreciation to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) for supporting the School of Dialogue educational program. Through recovering the assets of the victims of the Holocaust, the Claims Conference enables organizations around the world to provide education about the Shoah and to preserve the memory of those who perished.