Negotiating Difficult Pasts

ended

The project aims at fostering a practice-based culture of remembrance, innovative cooperation strategies, and multidisciplinary approach to heritage community building, combining civic activism, academia, arts and urbanism. It focuses its activities on twelve neglected Jewish heritage sites in Poland, where Jewish, Polish and German history and legacy overlap and intertwine, pointing to the difficult European experience of two totalitarian regimes in modern history – National Socialism and Communism. The destruction of Polish and Central-Eastern European Jewish communities left behind a very troubling legacy that can be defined as „difficult heritage”. Our assumption is that, if this difficult heritage is to be genuinely integrated into the local preservation and commemoration practices, and incorporated into ethics of care by residents and lawmakers, it has to be fostered as a joint effort of local communities, Jewish and non-Jewish, and supported by decision-makers on regional, national and European levels. Our project is aimed at creating a holistic DIFFICULT HERITAGE REMEMBRANCE FRAMEWORK, built on three main pillars: inclusivity, sustainability and epistemic justice. The project will explore and build on the potential of local communities, local activism and research through a series of over twenty physical and virtual events organized in five categories: commemorations, conferences, community building, public events and online educational trainings. We will include the most recent approach to memory studies, ecology and community building, involving a variety of stakeholders such as citizens, especially youth, non-governmental organizations, research centers, local authorities, law-makers, educators, architects, artists and more. The purpose is to build a network and provide a framework for cooperation for these multidisciplinary actors in order to work together on a new, 21st century-oriented approach.