Berlin Becomes a Classroom

All the photos used in this article were made by Wojciech Wojtkielewicz, courtesy of Centropa.

Last month, I traveled to Berlin for a week, to learn more about the history of European Jewry in the 20^th century but also to take a little breather from a country at war. Now I’m back home, writing an article about my experiences in that amazing week, while waiting with all Israelis for the next phase of a war that does not seem to end. Last year, at the Centropa Summer Academy 2023 in Vienna and Prague, we heard from our Ukrainian friends and colleagues about how the war with Russia had changed their lives and their schoolwork. We could not imagine then that three months later we would find ourselves at war too, and that one year later that war would still be going on, just like the one in Ukraine.

Centropa’s Fabian Ruehle with CSA teachers at the Memorial Museum Ravensbrueck.

Together with about 70 teachers and other educators from the USA, Europe and Israel (16 different countries all together), I participated in this year’s Centropa Summer Academy. Centropa is a Vienna-based NGO, with offices in Budapest, Hamburg and Washington, DC, which over the years has put together a unique collection of more than 1,200 life stories of elderly Jews from 15 different European countries. Earlier this year, the United States Holocaust Memorial acquired the Centropa Collection (including over 25,000 images). Last year, it won the Simon Wiesenthal Prize for civic engagement to educate the public about the Holocaust.

CSA participants at the Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt.

To create this extraordinary collection, Centropa staff members sat with the elderly men and women, went with them through their family pictures, and wrote down and recorded their life stories. All those stories, together with thousands of pictures, videos based on the stories, videos about aspects of European-Jewish history, podcasts, virtual tours, and much more, can be found on centropa.org/en. The website is available in English, German and Hungarian, but a lot of the content is also available in over a dozen other languages. In the course of each year, Centropa brings teachers from certain areas or countries together, to have them become familiar with all the Centropa resources and develop ideas on how to use that material in their classes, museums, national or regional curricula, and so on.

Edward Serotta, Founding Director of Centropa.

Once a year, a large number of American, European and Israeli teachers are brought to one or two European cities with a rich (Jewish and non-Jewish) history, for the Centropa Summer Academy. This year, we met in Germany’s capital. The program included visits to museums and memorials (the House of the Wannsee Conference, the Jewish Museum, Gleis/Platform 17, the Berlin Wall Memorial, the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe), walks in Berlin neighborhoods while using Centropa’s German Jewish Sourcebook (with stories and quotes related to specific locations), a lecture on German Jewry, a panel discussion with three prominent German-Jewish women on (women’s) Jewish identity in Germany today, and more. As Centropa’s Founding Director, Edward Serotta, likes to say, at the CSA we turn the city into our classroom.

Stolpersteine in the Rosenthaler Strasse.

Prior to arriving in Berlin, each participant had to choose one out of four electives (Cold War, Dilemmas, Resistance, Video). During the week, for 60-90 minutes a day, teams within each elective group worked out ideas for projects and lessons that they will bring to their schools and other places of education. Together with Maximilian von Schoeler, project manager at Centropa’s Hamburg office, I had the pleasure and privilege to lead the elective that focused on resistance during World War II. Quite a few Centropa stories deal with various forms of resistance, armed and unarmed, civilian and military, by Jews and non-Jews. Max and I contacted ‘our’ teachers before we all met in Berlin, explaining the topic and goals of our elective and what we and Centropa expected them to do in their teams, which were created based on the ages of the students that these educators work with. All ‘our’ teachers came very well prepared, already having read and watched several Centropa biographies. At the end of the week, each participant had to present their work group’s ideas to a small group of peers from the other electives. Throughout the coming school year, we will touch base online once or twice, so that the group members can share how they implemented their ideas in class (either on their own or with colleagues in other schools and countries, in so-called border-jumping projects), and how their students worked with and responded to the material.

Teachers from the Resistance elective at work.

During the week, we were the guests of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, where most of the group discussions and all the elective group work took place. I pointed out to my Israeli colleagues how wonderful it is that in Germany, foundations that are linked to but independent from political parties, help to strengthen democracy and further a constructive public discourse. For example, the KAS is the independent ‘think-tank’ of the Christian Democratic Union. In my own lessons, when I work on a project about the importance of human rights for both minorities and the majority in a country, I use not only the Centropa video which tells the story of the Jews of Sarajevo during the war in former Yugoslavia,  but also videos and other material produced (in English) by those foundations and by the German Foreign Ministry. Oh, the beautiful irony of history.

The memorial at Gleis (Platform) 17.

On Friday night, we all attended the Kabbalat Shabbat at the Pestalozzi Street Synagogue, where a distinctive musical tradition is preserved, with cantor Isidoro Abramowicz and a choir, accompanied by an organ, singing melodies that were composed mostly by 19^th century composer Louis Lewandowski. I was moved by the fact that at the end of the service, the community sang Adon Olam with the melody of Hatikvah, a custom which they started after 7 October last year. After the service, at the shabbat dinner in our hotel, I sang the kiddush, using Lewandowski’s melody that is sung every Friday night in Jewish communities and homes all over the world. I used some of my post-CSA time in Berlin to visit both Lewandowski’s grave and the honorary grave for Herbert Baum and members of his resistance group at the Weißensee cemetery.

CSA participants at the Museum Blindengewerkstatt Otto Weidt.

I am still ‘digesting’ much of what I learnt and experienced in Berlin last month. Two things that I saw and heard in that week still stand out in my memory. First of all, I admire and am grateful towards my colleagues, Jewish and non-Jewish, who teach Holocaust in their classes abroad. The experiences they shared with all of us made clear that these days that important task has become even more difficult and challenging than it was before. From a British colleague I learnt a gerund that I had not heard before: ‘othering’, seeing anybody who is different than you as ‘the other’, and thinking in terms of ‘us’ vs ‘them’. Of course, we in Israel, in a different context but also in similar ways, come across a lot of othering in our own classes, now more than ever. The fight for mutual and universal empathy, and against anti-Semitism, Holocaust-denial and other forms of hatred is clearly not a task for us Jews alone.

CSA participants visiting the Places of Remembrance memorial in the Bavarian Quarter, Berlin.

Which brings me to the second thing that I remember most vividly from those intense and very enriching seven days in Berlin. One full day we spent at the Memorial Museum Ravensbrück. Ravensbrück, a 90-100 minutes’ ride north of Berlin, was a concentration camp where between 1939-1945 around 120,000 women and 20,000 men were imprisoned under incredibly cruel circumstances. Tens of thousands of the prisoners were murdered in that camp. Most of them were not Jewish. We Israelis were asked to hold a ceremony at the lake near the former camp site, the kind of ceremony that we have at our schools every year on Yom HaShoah. We decided to teach our non-Jewish colleagues and friends some of the Israeli-Jewish elements of such ceremonies, but we also wanted to refer to the very special, horrific character of Ravensbrück, and to stress the historical fact that, paraphrasing Elie Wiesel’s words, all Jews were victims but not all victims were Jews. We Jews are usually only one group of many on the long target list of haters: whoever hates Jews never hates only Jews.

CSA participants at the Memorial Museum Ravensbrueck.

Therefore, we included an English translation of a poem by Wislawa Szymborska (“Could Have”) to the ceremony, and asked our friend Miśka, a teacher from Zamosc, Poland, to read the poem in her and Szymborska’s mother tongue. In addition, I chose to sing ‘Under Your White Stars” (in Yiddish). That song was written during the Shoah by Avraham Sutzkever and Avraham Brudno in the Vilna ghetto, but it is actually a very human, universal prayer and plea to God, asking Him for help but also where He is/was. Of course, we explained each element of the ceremony to all those present, focusing on the message that the fight against all forms of hatred is a mitzvah, an obligation, for us all, especially for those of us who work in education. While singing, I was nervous as I’d never been before when performing on stage. Both my voice and my hands were shaking. Not only did the occasion and the location evoke a strong emotional response, but we Ukrainian and Israeli teachers were also thinking of our loved ones at home, two countries at war. In those moments, near the beautiful lake at that cursed but very educational site, I felt a special personal and professional bond with my American, European and Israeli friends and colleagues.

CSA participants visiting the Places of Remembrance memorial in the Bavarian Quarter, Berlin.

To sum up, if you are an educator, I strongly encourage you to check out the Centropa website. The organization’s many resources may very well change what and how you teach. I know they did just that for me. Without that material, and without the dozens of colleagues that I have befriended and worked with at Centropa seminars in various European capitals (with several of them I have done cross-border projects), I would not be the teacher that I am today.

The following foundations and institutes supported the Centropa Summer Academy 2024: Claims Conference, European Union, Fund for Teachers, Insight, Jack Buncher Foundation, Jewish Federation of Greater Metrowest NJ, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, Lotto Stiftung Berlin, Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation, South Carolina Council on the Holocaust, Tarbut/TVT Community Day School.