Teaching the Past in the Future

2026-07-22

"Between 2000 and 2009 our Jewish oral history institute interviewed 1,230 elderly Jews still living in Europe and asked them to tell us stories about the entire century, just as they lived it, while scanning 25,000 of their privately-held photographs. Starting in 2005 we began transforming our most compelling interviews into award-winning multimedia films, traveling and permanent exhibitions, thematic websites and more recently walking tour apps and podcasts. We then began bringing teachers together so they could write their own lesson plans based on our content, form their own networks, and share them with their students. In 2025, our overall objective is to present these interviews in a way that brings these stories to life and makes them accessible so that schools, libraries, and cultural centers throughout Europe not only learn of the richness of Jewish life—from the Yiddish-speaking shtetls of the Baltics to the Ladino speaking communities in the Balkans—but also encourage people to become active citizens and stakeholders in their town’s Jewish history. We will create a podcast season of ""Centropa Stories"" about the year 1945 that will contain three episodes about the Battle of Berlin, the Liberation of the Concentration Camps, and how our interviewees started their life again after returning home. Furthermore, we will travel our exhibition on Polish-Jewish life in the 20th century to five Polish cities and we will conduct multiple walking tours in Budapest with schools and students. Lastly, we plan to have 10 seminars for teachers across the European Union. The seminars will provide educators with a methodology for bringing 20th century Jewish history and personal stories into their classrooms and will form partnerships for the future."

Austria

2025-10-01