Between July 18-25, Forum for Dialogue in partnership with Facing History and Ourselves and Polish Embassy in Washington organized the Facing History and Ourselves study trip to Poland. The program of the trip included meetings and discussions with experts in the areas of Polish/Jewish relations, as well as historical and contemporary situation of Poland. The group visited Warsaw Rising Museum, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and took a tour of Warsaw Jewish sites. The study trip continued further to Lublin, the Majdanek Memorial and Museum and Zamość, where participants met with the School of Dialogue students. On Friday, July 22, Facing History and Ourselves educators held a Shabbat dinner in Szczebrzeszyn with Leaders of Dialogue and Alumni of the School of Dialogue. They sang, bonded, and welcomed the Sabbath together in what many participants called the highlight of the trip. The next day, the group went on a tour Szczebrzeszyn, which was followed by several hours of workshops and reflective discussion. On the last day of their trip, the group returned to Warsaw to view the film “800 Jews in Our Town” with Forum educators.

While on a two week study tour of Eastern Europe, a group of rabbis and rabbinical students from Hebrew College met on Monday, July 11, with Olga Kaczmarek, Director of International Relations at Forum, to learn about Forum for Dialogue’s work. The meeting created a wonderful opportunity to present our mission and the School of Dialogue program, as well as to discuss the current Polish/Jewish relations.

Between June 25 and July 2, Forum for Dialogue organized the Second Summer School of Dialogue Program. Throughout the week a group of most involved School of Dialogue alumni were busy deepening their knowledge about the Jewish community today. Among other events, they met with a Holocaust survivor from Starachowice Mr. Howard Chandler, met Classroom Without Borders students and representatives of Warsaw Jewish community. They also created a map of memory of Jewish communities in their towns. The project is co-financed by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and the U.S. Embassy in Poland.

On June 29, a group from Jewish Museum of Australia visited participants of this year’s spring School of Dialogue program in Sosnowiec. After the meeting at school, the students guided the visitors around Jewish sites of their town. The meeting was especially touching as a member of the group from Australia, Mr. Joshua Pila, who was born in Sosnowiec and managed to escape from Sosnowiec ghetto during the war, completed the students’ narrative with his stories of his childhood.

Between June 25 and July 2, Forum for Dialogue hosted a delegation from the American Jewish Committee (AJC) for another study trip to Poland. The participants began the trip by visiting the Warsaw Rising Museum and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and met with Anna Azari, Ambassador of Israel to Poland, as well as the U.S. Ambassador Paul Jones. The next day, they visited the Warsaw JCC, spoke with Grzegorz Kozłowski of the Americas Department of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and had a tour of Warsaw’s Old Town. On Wednesday, the group traveled to Lublin, where they learned about the local Jewish history at Grodzka Gate – NN Theater. The day concluded with a trip to the Belzec Museum and memorial. The next day in Markowa, participants were able to visit the newly opened Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews before touring the historic synagogue in Łańcut and sightseeing in Krakow’s Jewish quarter, Kazimierz. On Friday, the group had a moving and educational tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau before returning to Krakow for the Jewish Culture Festival’s massive Shabbat Dinner. The trip closed with a tour of Krakow’s Old Town, meetings with Polish alumni of the AJC’s Polish-Jewish Exchange Program, and with the final concert of the Jewish Culture Festival. Thanks to all who participated for this wonderful experience! The study visit was made possible with the support of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Washington DC and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland.

This year Forum for Dialogue is cooperating with HIA Polska, as part of the Academy of Human Rights and Civic Activism. Six participants of the program have already visited our office to learn about Forum’s activities and mission. On June 14, the group went on a field trip to Zduńska Wola, where, together with Kamila Klauzińska, participant in our Leaders of Dialogue program, they conducted a street survey and cleaned the local Jewish cemetery. Understanding the nature of anti-Semitism in Poland and different aspects of the Polish/Jewish relations will help them create a social campaign to fight anti-Semitism and intolerance.

Having become a very popular concept, the open debates series devoted to Polish/Jewish relations that we began in 2012 in collaboration with Chlodna 25 café are continuing this year in PanstwoMiasto cafe in Warsaw.

The first debate this year, which took place in January, involved Lukasz Baksik, the photographer and author of the photo project “Matzevot for Everyday Use” and Agnieszka Nieradko, representative of the Rabbinical Commission on Cemeteries. Our guests talked about the fate of Jewish cemeteries and graves in the war and post-war Poland.

In February, those gathered discussed the realities of individuals working at commemorating the local Jewish heritage in their regions. After watching Władysław Pasikowski’s movie “Pokłosie” the audience was invited to take part in a debate with Bogdan Białek, President of the Jan Karski Association in Kielce, Witold Dabrowski, deputy director of the Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre in Lublin and Grzegorz Kaminski, a teacher from Toszek.

In April, we tried to “read Warsaw” from Warsaw Ghetto maps together with the Polish Center for Holocaust Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The debate was organized in conjunction with the release of the Center’s renewed and supplemented publication “The Warsaw Ghetto: Guide to the Non-Existent City,” and was attended by Beata Chomątowska, a journalist and founder of the Association for Social and Cultural Initiatives ‘Station Muranow’, Pawel E. Weszpiński, cartographer and historian of cartography and Jakub Petelewicz from the Polish Center for Holocaust Research.

In June, debate participants discussed the meaning of Christian-Jewish dialogue with Father Wojciech Lemański, parish priest in the small town of Jasienica and member of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews.

Each summer, an American comes to work as an intern at Forum for Dialogue as part of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) Goldman Fellowship Program. This year’s Fellow, Rebecca Galpern, has started her internship and she will be with us until the beginning of August. Rebecca is a recent graduate of Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York. She created an ad-hoc major of Jewish Cultural History through the CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies program, focusing on the literary, cultural, and political history of Jews around the world. She will be helping with the preparations for the AJC study trip to Poland, creating a Yiddish toolkit for our School of Dialogue participants and supporting daily operations of our office. Welcome aboard!

It’s been a pleasure and an honor to meet Ms. Esther Pinskier, mother and mother-in-law to Forum’s friends and former study trip participants Marcia and Henry Pinskier, a Warsaw-born Holocaust survivor, who lives in Melbourne now. We belatedly celebrated her 90th birthday here and next day she visited us again at the office, before setting off for further journey. We couldn’t get enough of the conversations and we hope for more.

Ada, Marcin, Kasia, Magda and Szymon participated in the Summer School of Dialogue program last year. This year they spend a few days at the Forum office training to become Forum educators. They’ll start working in schools in the fall semester! The event was organized with the support from the Pratt Foundation.