Vision Schools Scotland were hosted by Yad Vashem and Grodzka Gate NN Theatre Centre (the Lublin Jewish historical centre) for a week long seminar for Scottish Teachers in July.
The itinerary included:
- Site visits and tours to the death camps Sobibor and Belzec;
- Site visit and tour to concentration camp Majdanek;
- Tours to Chelm, Josefow and Zamosc and their synagogues and commemoration centres– towns where there had been substantial Jewish populations (40%, 80% and 35% respectively) and where virtually all Jews had been killed;
- A site visit to the execution site near Jozefow where 1700 Jewish women, children and older people had been killed by the 101 German Reserve Police battalion by bullet. And a reflection on what that atrocity my middle aged German reservists might suggest.
- Walking tours of Lublin exploring the destruction of the ghetto there in 1941 and the killing of its Jewish population (some 30% — approx. 43,000), transported mainly to Belzec;
- Time to explore and view and discuss how to incorporate resources from the Lublin historical Jewish archive into classroom practice;
- Reflection and seminars/workshops on:
- Jewish Life in Poland before the war ;
- Presentation on Grodzka Gate memorial project ;
- The planning of Aktion Reinhardt ;
- Incorporating archive resources into the classroom;
- Shared practice seminars of Holocaust education, incorporating teaching about antisemitism, tensions arising from the events in Gaza, our VSS research and further research areas, and CLPL ;
- Teaching the Final Solution ;
- Three additional reflective sessions on what we saw and how it can be incorporated into classroom practice.
We further had two evening cultural events, involving Yiddish language songs and drama and reflective discussion with the artists at one of them. Photographs below.
