Seminar for Czech teachers at Yad Vashem in Israel

In late October and early November 2014, a group of 18 teachers from all over the Czech Republic took part in an educational seminar held in the Yad Vashem Memorial in Israeli Jerusalem. This seminar, organized by the Yad Vashem Memorial, the Czech Ministry of Education and the Terezín Memorial, is always the highlight in the four-grade structure of seminars focused on teaching about the Holocaust, which are standardly offered to Czech teachers by the Terezín Memorial and the Czech Ministry of Education in collaboration with other Czech and foreign organizations.
The seminar was open with a tour of the Old City of Jerusalem. The following eight days, however, were full of workshops, lectures and tours of individual exposures at Yad Vashem Memorial. The topics of educational blocks were diverse, yet connected chronologically and thematically as if lined with a red thread. Among the most fascinating were a lecture on traditional Judaism, a presentation introducing the inter-war life in Poland, up to one of the last lectures with the focus on “Allies and the Holocaust”. Equally interesting was also a presentation on the criteria of granting the title of Righteous Among the Nations, as well as the approaches of Yad Vashem to teaching about the Holocaust. Within the workshops, teachers obtained a lot of materials and ideas for their own teaching.

On Friday evening, the group attended prayers in one of the Jerusalem synagogues. Saturday was devoted to understanding Israel, teachers visited the fortress of Masada and the Dead Sea.

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