Fragmented Memories – Holocaust Education in the 21st Century
International Conference for Museum Educators and Teachers

The Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest organises an international educational conference “Fragmented Memories: Holocaust Education in the 21st century” to be held on 18 April 2024 in Budapest.

Location: 1094 Budapest, 39. Páva street
Date: 18 April 2024 at 9:30 am – 5:00 pm

The conference will be held in English with Hungarian interpretation.

Please register at the following link by April 17:
https://bit.ly/oktatási_konferencia

PROGRAMME
18 April

9:30 Registration

10:00 Opening speeches
Dr. Andor Grósz, Chairman of the Board, Holocaust Memorial Center
Dr. Bence Rétvári, Deputy Minister, Parliamentary State Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior

10:15-11:00 Plenary lecture
Szőnyi Andrea (Zachor Alapítvány)
Teaching and Learning Recommendations about the Holocaust

Introduction to the IHRA’s Resource for Educators and its practical application in teaching. The presentation aims to introduce the Teaching and Learning Recommendations about the Holo-caust, a resource developed by experts in the Education Working Group of the International Holo-caust Remembrance Alliance with a focus on practical implementation possibilities by providing ex-amples of tools and methods that educators can use in their immediate work. Besides outlining the resource itself including the history of its development and its current status, the session focuses on international overarching principles and their localized application including teaching strategies and approaches embedded in specific teaching materials.

11:00- 12:30 Museum Education

Monika Koszyńska (POLIN, Warsaw)
To understand the loss, we need to know who they were and how they lived here. Education about the Holocaust at the POLIN Museum

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is a public institution operating since 2013 in a mod-ern beutiful building located on the site of the former Warsaw’s Northern District, which until 1945 was overwhelmingly inhabited by the Polish Jewish community and was the second largest concen-tration of Jews in the world after New York City. During World War II, the German Nazis organized the Warsaw Ghetto on its grounds. It is the site of the first armed uprising against the German occupiers – the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. With all the complex and intractable history of the site in mind, the Museum conducts an extensive education program on the Holocaust of Polish and European Jews. Education about this most tragic part of the history of Polish Jews is addressed by the Museum to all audiences, with a special focus on school-age youth and their teachers. The POLIN Museum’s Education Department uses the latest didactic and technological advances for this purpose. It uses a wide variety of didactic means, with the permanent exhibition at the forefront, but also makes use of witness and survivor video testimonies, produces educational films and collaborates with au-thors of literature for children and young people. A special place in education about the Holocaust is occupied by the Social-Educational Daffodil Campaign, which every year brings together thousands of Poles and Polish women, but also representatives of communities from other countries in Europe and the world in commemoration of the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Matej Beránek (Sered, Holocaust Museum, Slovakia)
Educational programmes of the SNM-MJC-Sereď Holocaust Museum

The Sereď Holocaust Museum is part of the Slovak National Museum – Museum of Jewish Culture. It was created on the site of the former labour and concentration camp in Sereď, which represents an authentic location that is linked to the tragic era of the solution of the Jewish question in Slova-kia during World War II. The museum exhibits period documents, photographs, and items related to the persecution of Jews in Slovakia. One of the exhibited artefacts is a cattle wagon used to de-port Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The museum organises and provides educational events, seminars, and courses focusing on educating and informing the public about Jewish culture and the impact of the Holocaust on the life of Jews in Slovakia. Educational activities of the muse-um are based on historical materials, audio-visual testimonies of holocaust survivors, permanent exhibitions and historical site of the former labour and concentration camp in Sereď.

Tanja Tuleković (Republic of the Serbian People in Bosnia-Herzegovina)
Museum education in “MEMORIAL DONJA GRADINA”, Republic of Srpska

The importance of visiting the memorial is reflected in the following: they are authentic places where historical research can be done, visitors can be taught in them, these are places where commemo-rations are held, there we pay tribute to the victims of the Ustasha crime of genocide, and this leads us to a deeper reflection.
In Donja Gradina we combine visual and textual sources, so the visitor gets a rounded historiographical view. The connection of scientific research and technological innovations follows the needs of the modern visitor, and it is also useful for teachers’ educational work.

12:30-13:30 Lunch-break

13:30-15:00 Innovative Approaches in Holocaust Education

Victoria Kumar (ERINNERN:AT, OeAD, Austria)
Teaching and learning about the Holocaust – The Digital Memory Landscape

How to effectively communicate the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust to teachers and students is the key question for ERINNERN:AT. As a programme at the OeAD (Austria’s Agency for Education and Internationalization) it promotes the transfer of historical and methodological-di-dactic knowledge into educational practice as well as the reflection on the causes of the Holocaust and its consequences for the present. In recent years, this key question has broadened and become more concrete by asking how we can use digital technologies in education and how biographies, places and content can be linked together. The project DERLA provides answers and shows how lo-cation-based and media-supported learning can take place in digital space but also directly “on site”. The Digital Memory Landscape Austria (DERLA) is a documentation and education project, realized by ERINNERN:AT, the Centre for Jewish Studies and the Centre for Information Modelling Graz. On the website www.erinnerungslandschaft.at it documents the places and signs of remembrance of the victims and places of terror of National Socialism in Austria and aims at a critical examination of National Socialism and fascism and the remembrance of them. The interdisciplinary cooperation project also aims to develop new concepts for digital remembrance education by offering numerous learning modules and supporting materials for students and teachers. In the lecture, DERLA will be presented, and concrete questions of digitization and mediation in ed-ucation will be explored.

Miško Stanišić (Novi Sad, Serbia)
“Ester” – Educational Graphic Novel for Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust

“Ester” is a unique educational material: a collection of illustrated dramatized stories accompa-nied by historical records, such as archival documents, photographs, newspapers, and testimonies, and contemporary photographs, maps, glossaries, and tasks for students for further investigation, among others, at authentic locations, in archives and museums, or online. The methodology is ad-justed for students from very young ages (9-10) to emerging adults. At the same time, “Ester” has proved to be an excellent tool to engage local archivists, librarians, and museum workers in explor-ing local Holocaust microhistories while, at the same time, gaining new knowledge about standards, goals, and approaches to Holocaust education, and a better understanding of Holocaust-related records and its potential in education. “Ester” is a fresh and, for young generations, appealing and interesting learning aid that connects the past with the present by engaging students in their own re-search and reflection about historical records while keeping the focus on deeply engaging personal stories based on historical facts. In addition, some of the novels focus on archivists and researchers and the research process, revealing to young people how we know what we know about this history while offering important facts about source criticism and media literacy.

Maribor Boris Hajdinjak (Maribor, Slovenia)
The Fate of the Jews from Prekmurje in the Works of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész

Whenever I think of the traumatic impact of Auschwitz, I end up dwelling on the vitality and creativity of those living today. Thus, in thinking about Auschwitz, I reflect, paradoxically, not on the past but the future. Imre Kertész, Heureka!, Stockholm, 7th December 2002 One of the reasons for today’s level of awareness of the significance of the Holocaust in history is the works of writers who survived it. The most famous are Primo Levi (1919, Turin–1987, Turin), Elie Wiesel (1928, Sighetu Marmației–2016, New York), also Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1986, and Imre Kertész (1929, Budapest–2016, Budapest), also the Nobel laureate in Literature in 2002. The talk will present why and how their experiences are similar to the fate of the Jews from Prekmurje/Muravidék. It will also be suggested how these similarities can be used to portray the fate of the Jews from this region and why this is important.

15:00-15:30 Coffee-break

15:30-17:00 Challenges in Teaching about the Holocaust

Noa Mkayton (Yad Vashem, Israel)
The Challenges of Teaching the Holocaust after October 7

Since the attack on Israel on October 7 and the ensuing war between Israel and Hamas, antisem-itism is drastically on the rise worldwide, affecting not only the security of Jewish individuals and institutions, but also the conditions of Holocaust education. This lecture will explore the complex linkage between Holocaust education and the teaching about current antisemitism. Is Holocaust Education a tool to tackle antisemitism? What tools are needed in order to confront antisemitism in class? What is an adequate educational answer to antisemiticaccusations of Israel that challenge the basic conditions under which educators teach about the Holocaust? The lecture will explore the theoretical frame of these questions and suggest practical steps for confronting them in the class-room.

Oana Nestian-Sandu (TOLI, and Timișoara, Romania)
Learning from the Past, Acting for the Future: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Holocaust, Human Rights and Intercultural Education

The Holocaust is one of the most complex phenomena in world history and it should never be reduced to simplistic explanations. This means that the tools of one discipline are not enough to really understand it (or attempt to understand it). Through interdisciplinarity, though, we can find complex answers to complex questions, even if these answers are difficult to accept sometimes, we can analyze our past and our present from diverse perspectives, in order to get a more nuanced and unbiased understanding.
The interdisciplinary approach that we propose – which has been tested with over 2,000 teachers in over 10 countries in Europe – combines the approaches and methods of Holocaust education, hu-man rights education and intercultural education, with the aim to guide students to learn about the past, understand the way in which the past is connected with the present and contribute to the de-velopment of democratic and intercultural societies in which every individual can live a life of dignity. When we look at the past through the lens of human rights, we can better understand how an event like the Holocaust was possible, how the propaganda functioned and how the rights of Jewish people – and people belonging to other groups – were taken away progressively. At the same time, through the lens of the Holocaust, we can understand that today we need to take action when hu-man rights are violated or at risk of being violated for members of any group living in our societies. This methodology develops students’ competences for democratic culture and raises their awereness bout the unfair treatment of various groups in their society and about the need to take action.

Árvai Noémi-Goldmann Márta (HDKE, Budapest)
Challenges in Teacher Training: Holocaust by Bullets in Holocaust Education

Our presentation will shed light on a relatively little known and taught area of the holocaust, namely the holocaust by bullets, i.e. mass murder committed by Nazi Germany in collaboration with the local authorities in the territories of the former Soviet Union between 1941-44. For the last 8 years the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest has organised 7 successful international seminars to-gether with the French research group, Yahad in Unum highlighting the Hungarian aspects of these atrocities. In our teacher trainings, we have been using eyewitness interviews and oral history sourc-es that we have translated into Hungarian.

17:00 Closing remarks
András Zima, director of Holocaust Memorial Center

Csatolmányok