Fund for Teachers Fellowship Experience

Day 8 of my Fund for Teachers fellowship with Centropa Summer Academy 2024:

My last day in Berlin I had some time to explore the city a bit more on my own. I visited Berlin Cathedral, Alexander Plaz, and St. Mary’s Church (a medieval church). At Bahnhof Potsdamer Platz, I took a close look at fragments from the Berlin Wall. I also went to see a very interesting and free exhibition by the Volkswagen Group titled “ICONIC: A Timeless Journey of Culture, Society and Mobility.” This exhibition showcases artifacts of modernity which have shaped design, mobility and architecture from the 1950’s to today.

As I write this final post of my Fund for Teachers fellowship with Centropa Summer Academy, my heart is filled with gratitude. Thank you so much Fund for Teachers for giving me the opportunity to attend Centropa Summer Academy 2024, and be part of such life-changing learning experience. Thank you.

Day 7 of my Fund for Teachers fellowship with Centropa Summer Academy 2024:

On this day, I visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It is located in the city center, very close to Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag Building. The Memorial has 2,700 concrete stelae of different heights. We had a guided tour of the memorial led by one of the memorial’s educators. He explained that the architect designed it in an abstract way in order for visitors to interpret the memorial in their own personal way. I then entered the underground information center where one can learn more about the diversity of Jewish life in Europe before Holocaust, and the Holocaust, by exploring different themed rooms: the Room of Families, the Room of Names, the Room of Sites, and the Room of Dimensions. I also visited the Memorial for the Persecuted Homosexuals. This memorial to the homosexuals persecuted by the N**i regime is located at the Tiergarten, at a short distance from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Since we were very close to Brandenburg Gate, our group leader also took us there for a quick stop to see it.

In the afternoon, back at the academy’s main venue, I presented my lesson plan using Centropa resources in a jigsaw style activity. It was a great learning experience listening to educators from the other elective courses present their lessons using Centropa resources, as well as giving each other feedback.

In the evening, all of us in the academy had a final dinner together at a restaurant close to the hotel…and said good-bye to each other. I am so grateful I got to spend my Fund for Teachers fellowship with such an amazing group of international educators. We were seventy educators from sixteen different countries (Ex. Poland, Croatia, Macedonia, Czech Republic, Serbia, Germany, Greece, United Kingdom, Slovenia, Ukraine, Israel, Hungary, etc.). Not only did we learn more about Jewish life before the Holocaust, the Cold War, the Holocaust, and explored Berlin together, but we also collaborated and learned about each other’s diverse cultures and backgrounds. My roommate during the academy was a wonderful teacher from the Czech Republic!🙂 This unique opportunity to meet and interact with such a diverse group of educators made my fellowship experience even more special and enriching.

Day 6 of my Fund for Teachers fellowship with Centropa Summer Academy 2024:

I started the day with a visit to the Soviet Memorial Treptow, which commemorates the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died fighting to capture Berlin during WWII. I then made a quick stop at the East Side Gallery to see “The Fraternal Kiss” mural. In the afternoon, I visited the Berlin Wall Memorial.

Once back at the academy’s main site, I kept working on creating the lesson plans using Centropa resources, and later engaged in a Cold War reflection. I also participated in a Cold War quiz using Kahoot. All participants in the academy played in small groups, and it was a lot of fun!

In the evening, I headed to a street market at Breitscheidplatz with some of my colleagues in the academy. I had some delicious German sausage and saw the impressive Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the symbolic center of West Berlin. This church was partially destroyed by the Allies during WWII. Today, its ruins are a memorial for peace between nations.

Day 5 of my Fund for Teachers fellowship with Centropa Summer Academy 2024:

Part of Centropa Summer Academy’s program is to give teachers the opportunity to take one of five elective classes. Throughout the week, we met with our elective group and planned a project/lessons using Centropa resources related to our elective class topic. I chose the elective titled “Choiceless Choices: Dilemas Jews Faced Under the N**is and their Responses.” On Day 5 of the academy, I met my elective group in the hotel lobby and headed out to the city for a field trip using public transportation. Our first stop was at the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof train station, which was used for the Kindertransport. At this site, we read a couple of Kindertransport survivor testimonies from Centropa’s archives. We then headed to the Topography of Terror Museum…the SS and Gestapo headquarters were located here. After visiting the Topography of Terror, our elective class was divided into smaller groups to do a city search. I did a city search with three other educators in the program. We visited Checkpoint Charlie, Bebelplatz Book Burning Memorial, Brandenburg Gate, and the Reichstag Building. We then walked back to the academy’s main location passing through the beautiful Tiergarden Park.

In the afternoon, I continued working on the lesson plans using Centropa resources, and later in the evening, I attended a Shabbat service at Pestalozzi Street Synagogue. I ended the day with a Shabbat dinner back in the hotel.

Day 4 of my Fund for Teachers fellowship with Centropa Summer Academy 2024:

This was a very emotional day. I left very early from the hotel to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp Memorial. Ravensbrück was the largest concentration camp for women in N**i Germany. The prisoners came from more than 30 countries, mostly from Poland. I started the visit with a guided tour of the camp. The tour guide took the Centropa group inside the former homes of the perpetrators. The camp had male SS administrators and only female SS guards to oversee the prisoners. Also, many female SS guards received training here, and then were sent to other camps.

The emotions I felt during my visit to Ravensbrück were very intense. After entering the houses where the SS perpetrators lived and learning more about them from the guide, it was time to enter the camp’s area where thousands of women were imprisoned, forced to work, and murdered…I even saw the crematorium. This was my first time visiting the site of a former N**i concentration camp…tears came rolling down my cheeks.

Today, the apartment complex where the female SS guards lived is used as a youth hostel for visiting school classes. We had lunch at the youth hostel, and then had a group discussion on what we can learn from Ravensbrück Memorial site. At the end of the visit, we had a memorial ceremony. Everyone in the seminar got a flower and placed it in the lake located next to the memorial site, as a way to remember those who perished during the Holocaust.

Day 3 of my Fund for Teachers fellowship with Centropa Summer Academy 2024:

I started the day with a guided tour through the Bavarian Quarter in Schoneberg and its “Places of Remembrance” memorial. Some of the most prominent Jews of Berlin lived in this quarter before World War II (lawyers, doctors, scientists, poets, historians, etc.). At the Beyerischer train station, one can see an exhibit honoring many of these notable Jews, Albert Einstein being one of them. There are also many signs displayed on posts around this quarter, which state many of the Nuremberg Laws that revoked Jews of their citizenship rights, singled them out as a minority, and excluded them from daily life. The signs in this residential neighborhood are not intended for tourists. They are written only in German, and they are for residents of this area to remember the anti-Jewish laws and regulations Jews had to face in N**i Germany.

After the tour, I headed to Gleis 17 Memorial at Grunewald Station. This is a former train platform from where Jews were deported to various concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. As I walked along Platform 17, I could read on steel plates the number of Jews deported to the different camps, and the deportation dates in chronological order. Approximately 10,000 German Jews were deported from this platform. There are many trees spread along the tracks of the platform, symbolizing that no train will leave this station using this track… ever again.

After visiting Gleis 17 Memorial, I headed to the House of the Wannsee Conference, which today is a memorial and educational site. The house has a beautiful architecture, a gorgeous garden, and in the back a lake. But in this luxury villa, fifteen high-ranking N**i officials met to further plan the mass murder of Jews, or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. I participated in a guided tour and workshop conducted by two educators at the House of the Wannsee Conference, in which I learned more detailed information about the conference participants and original documents produced at this meeting. After eating lunch at the House of Wannsee Conference and exploring it a bit more, I went back to the main site of the academy, where my fellow educators in the program and I had some time to reflect as a group on the day’s visits.

Day 2 of my Fund for Teachers fellowship with Centropa Summer Academy 2024:

I spent my second day of the fellowship with Berlin as my classroom, learning about Jewish life prior to World War II. After having a good breakfast at the hotel, I went on a walking tour through the former Jewish Quarter of Berlin. We started the tour at the location of the very first synagogue in Berlin, which survived the pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, but it was later bombed and destroyed during WWII. At this site, one can also find the “Block of Women,” a memorial that commemorates the peaceful protests in 1943 by non-Jewish women in mixed marriages with Jewish men who had been arrested by the N**is. Their husbands were eventually released, and the memorial reminds us of these women’s courage as well as the persecution of Jewish people in Berlin.

The tour later took me to see what was considered the largest synagogue in Germany, the New Synagogue, designed with a beautiful Moorish style. This synagogue was also heavily damaged during World War II. Its façade was reconstructed and today it is open to the public. We also stopped to see some stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, a memorial of plaques on city streets and sidewalks throughout Europe that commemorate victims of the Holocaust outside of their former homes. Another stop in the tour was in front of the residence of the first female ordained as a rabbi. Her name was Regina Jonas. Her story is very inspiring. Later in the day, I visited the Jewish Museum of Berlin, where I learned more about German-Jewish history, tracing the history from the middle ages to today.

Visiting all these sites helped me gain a deeper understanding of the Jewish community that existed in Berlin before World War II and the Holocaust. Thanks Fund for Teachers!


summeracademy

Day 1 of my Fund for Teachers fellowship with Centropa Summer Academy 2024:

My FFT fellowship in Berlin started with registration at noon. I received my name tag, and a Centropa Summer Academy 2024 bag with a Centropa notebook, a pen, a water bottle, and a copy of Centropa’s book titled The German Jewish Source Book. This book includes the personal stories of four German Jews who grew up in Weimar Germany and were able to flee their country after the N**i’s came to power in 1933. We then had the opening and welcoming session. Opening and welcoming remarks made clear that the focus of the academy is for participants to learn more about how Jews in Central and Eastern Europe lived, not how they were murdered, and the diversity of these Jewish communities. On this first day, I also learned about some of Centropa resources on Germany.

Then, the academy had Michael Brenner as the keynote speaker with a presentation titled “Before the Deluge. German Jews in the Weimar Republic.” This talk taught me more about German Jewish life before the Shoah. One quote that stayed with me from Mr. Brenner’s presentation was: “We should be careful not to reduce Jewish life to victimhood or persecution only.”

After the day's program, the academy had a delicious welcome dinner for all participants.

Guten Tag! This FFT fellow has safely arrived in Berlin to start her fellowship with Centropa tomorrow!🙂

Truly grateful, honored and excited to be a 2024 Fund for Teachers Fellow!!!😀 In a couple of days, I will start my Fund for Teachers fellowship in Berlin, Germany!!🇩🇪 I will be attending the Centropa Summer Academy!