| 2019 |
Józefów nad Wisłą
John Paul II High School Complex
John Paul II High School Complex
| 2019 |
Józefów nad Wisłą is a picturesque small town in the Lublin area. A derelict Jewish cemetery located in a nearby forest was where local students conducted their first School of Dialogue activities. They cleaned up the cemetery grounds and scrubbed clean its only surviving headstone. Then, they petitioned local authorities to mark and commemorate the site. At the same time, they were exploring their town’s prewar history, finding archival documents and photographs in the local archives and interviewing elderly residents, who had been children before World War II. Yearbooks from a local school proved to be fascinating sources of information, as half of its student population before World War II had been Jewish. Project participants were thus able to talk about people their age, using their actual names.
The walking tour organized as part of the project included stops that had been relevant to Józefów’s Jewish residents. A small prayer house that had once been also the rabbi’s home is now home to the Volunteer Fire Department. The most important heritage sites, including the synagogue and mikveh, had been demolished. Students prepared hand-painted posters based on original prewar photographs that they later presented as part of an in-school exhibition on the history of Jews in Józefów.
School: John Paul II High School Complex
Honorable mention: Honorable mention at 2019 School of Dialogue in the “Discovering history” category
Students: 7th year
Teacher: Jolanta Jurak
Educators: Magda Małecka, Agnieszka Zawiślak
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.
