Some historians say the twentieth century began in Sarajevo in 1914. We believe the twentieth Century also ended in Sarajevo in 1992. In between the Austrian Archduke’s assassination and the Bosnian Serb siege of Sarajevo, there is—among all the history, tragedy and epochal events--a Jewish story to tell, one that is relevant for all of us—Jews, Muslims and Christians, North Americans, Europeans, Israelis.
“The extermination of the past--by design, by neglect, by good intention--is what characterizes the history of our time. That is why the ahistorical memory of a marginal community that found itself in the whirlwind may yet be the best guide to our era." Tony Judt, The New Republic, 1996
“Aliens everywhere and everywhere at home, lifted above national quarrels, the Jews in the twentieth century were the principal cosmopolitan, integrating element in Central Europe: they were its intellectual cement, a condensed version of its spirit, creators of its spiritual unity...In their destiny the fate of Central Europe seems to be concentrated, reflected and to have found its symbolic image.” Milan Kundera, A Kidnapped West, or Culture Bows Out, Granta, 1984
Goals and objectives for all participants
--to view Centropa’s newest films (on a Hungarian war hero and a Viennese Holocaust survivor) and write lesson plans on how use them in class;
--to meet teachers and school directors from other countries and create partnerships
1 that will produce videos and other projects together;
--to take part in workshops run by other teachers, who are using digital story telling, video, and common core projects ;
--to tour two of the great cities of Central Europe and add to your own knowledge base on 20th century Jewish, intellectual and cultural history of Europe;
--to read and discuss The Hare with Amber Eyes, by Edmund de Waal, and books on the Balkans not yet chosen
Your Centropa Summer Academy Assignment this year: each teacher will work in groups and create two VCB’s (a Virtual Centropa Box), one VCB will be on our online Sephardic content, the other on our Vienna or other Ashkenazi community content.
This will be your web-based box (it will actually your own web page) that will have in it links to Centropa films, biographies, timelines, photographs, biographies and the lesson plans.
You’ll also be writing your own blogs during the Summer Academy, sharing your ideas and pictures with your students as you walk through these two great cities. The end result is when you return to your classrooms, you will have a set of tools— which you have created yourself--that you can use throughout the year.
Assigned books to read The Hare with Amber Eyes, by Edmund de Waal. When the author, a sculptor in London, inherits 264 small Japanese figures, he decides to take a journey through his family’s rise—and dramatic fall, which begins in Odessa, travels to Paris, and ends in Vienna. The Lazarus Project, by Aleksander Hemon. The latest novel by a writer now compared to Nabokov, this hysterical, poignant novel will bring you closer in touch with Sarajevo and its citizens than any other we know.
Recommended Old Masters, by Thomas Bernhard. This short novel is one long monologue, in which one elderly friend meets another friend each week in front of a Tintoretto in the Kunsthistorishes Museum in Vienna. His friend rails at what perfectly horrible people the Austrians are. Written by an author who makes all other misanthropes seem like St Thomas Aquinas, this is the funniest and most brilliant book one can find on postwar Austria.
The Sleepwalkers, by Christopher Clark. Over the past century, more than 25,000 books have been written on the origins of the First World War. It seems another 25,000 have been written this year alone. There are several important books to recommend, but we suggest this very well written history as a starting point.
Sarajevo 1941 by Emily Greble. Her doctoral study—based on contemporary documents--on how Sarajevo’s multi-ethnic society reacted during the Second World War. Greble spoke at our summer academy in Sarajevo in 2011. Go to our home page, click on podcasts, and you can find her lecture online.
Logavina Street, by Barbara Demick (sometimes sold under the title Besieged). Then a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Demick spent the better part of a year during the siege of Sarajevo getting to know the residents of one narrow street in
2 the city center. By focusing on each household, Demick brings the horrors, the boredom and the pain of what it was like to live in a city surrounded by rockets, mortars and snipers.
Wednesday July 9
12:30. Program begins with a buffet lunch in the Vienna Diplomatic Academy, the international institution that has been training European diplomats for more than a century; Welcome by Dr Hans Winkler, former State Secretary of Foreign Affairs, & introduction of Centropa staff and participants
14:00 Icebreaker activity, led by veteran teachers and Centropa staff. We begin with a short presentation by teachers from Serbia and Florida, whose students are now working together on projects. This is where we want to be; this is how we want to connect our students—through history, social media and digital story telling
14:15. Each national group stands up, introduces itself, and presents a three minute presentation—why we are the best group to partner with (this is not meant to be entirely serious)
15:15. Bus to drive us to PSK Bank: one of the great symbols of Vienna 1900, designed by Otto Wagner. We then walk down to the street to the Museum of Applied Arts (the MAK) to view Vienna 1900 exhibition and discussion with curators
17:15. Bus delivers us to Vienna City Hall, where we tour this great building, and are then hosted for dinner by the Mayor’s office.
19:30 Free to return to hotel or evening on your own.
Thursday, July 10
Location: Diplomatic Academy 9:00 The challenges before us: Claus Raidl, President of the Austrian National Bank, on international relations, connecting students and shrinking our worlds.
1914-2014: The Commemoration Year We view and then discuss the world that was, and the troubled world (post 1914) that came to be.
3 9:15 For new teachers: presentation of Centropa website followed by the screening of two films narrated by CBS Newsman Morley Safer --Maps, Central Europe and History --Jewish Soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian Army
These two films, narrated in English by Morley Safer, give every teacher context for teaching the 20th century—in social studies, history and Holocaust education.
Veteran teachers to meet and review what they have done during the year
European teachers meet for a discussion on Jews in and after the First World War. They had always been Europe’s trans-national people. Now they were hemmed in by new borders, and pledged their loyalty to their new countries. A discussion on identity and changing borders. Discussion to be led by historian.
American teachers meet for a discussion on DBQ (document-based questions) and how to use Centropa with Common Core. Session led by Centropa veteran teachers from South Carolina.
10:15 Film screening: The Mayor Who Served in Hell: The Story of Miksa Domonkos. Our newest film, set in Hungary. The story of a hero of the First World War, when he served the Austro-Hungarian Army. In the Second World War, he battled the Nazis and their Hungarian accomplices as he ran the infamous Budapest Ghetto. Then in 1952, he was picked up by the Communists and tortured—for “killing Raoul Wallenberg.”
10:45 Coffee break 11:00 Break into groups for work sessions. How to use these films in our classes. Discuss and write out basic lesson plan
12:30 Lunch with guests from the City of Vienna
13:30 Groups make their presentations to larger group. Discussions and feedback from others.
14:30 Lecture: Memory and Forgetting. Austria is a country that for many years, remembered poorly and forgot very well. We will discuss and compare how Germany and Austria came to terms with the Third Reich and its aftermath. But does any country remember its dark chapters well? Discuss.
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15:15 Bus delivers us to Heldenplatz, where the Habsburgs ruled and where hundreds of thousands of Austrians came to greet Adolf Hitler in March 1938. We then visit the glorious National Library of Austria, and view the very first facsimile copy of the Sarajevo Haggadah
We then walk over to the see the Hradlicka memorial “against war and terrorist regimes.” Hint: it’s not a Holocaust memorial, even if it looks like one
18:00 We enter the Vienna Jewish Museum, where we will tour the First World War exhibition and have a discussion with curators and the director, Danielle Spera
19:30 Free evening on your own
Friday, July 11
Location: DA Wien 8:45 Diplomatic Academy. Lecture: Vienna and the modern: Freud, Wittgenstein, Canetti, Herzl, Schnitzler, Roth, Zweig
9:30 Group walks from Diplomatic Academy to Belvedere Museum, one of the great palaces and gardens of Europe (built for Prince Eugene of Savoy, who helped chase the Ottomans away from Vienna and burned Sarajevo to the ground in 1697), where we will view the Gustav Klimts and then have a discussion with the museum’s curators about Jews, art in Vienna and restitution.
12:30 Lunch at the Diplomatic Academy with 50 Centropa interviewees (all of them Holocaust survivors). Guests invited: the US, German, Israeli, Polish, Greek and other ambassadors and Chief Rabbi Chaim Eisenberg
Over coffee, participants will chat with our interviewees, all of whom speak a variety of languages: German, English, Hungarian, Polish and Czech. Centropa will hand out one page fact sheets on each of our interviewees
14:30 Film screening of our newest Austrian film: The Past Is Another Country, the story of Leo Luster, who was born in Vienna, survived Auschwitz, and emigrated to Israel, post-war
15:00 Group work: using the Luster film, and the story of Vienna’s Jews, in your classrooms
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16:00 Coffee break
16:15 Presentations by groups
17:00 Participants return to hotel, prepare for Shabbat
19:00 Shabbat services at the Seitenstettengasse Synagogue, followed by shabbat dinner in community restaurant.
Our dinner guests will be members of the Vienna Jewish community and we will discuss what it’s like to be a Jew in Austria today.
Optional: after dinner we will visit the eerie Holocaust memorial, designed by British sculptor Rachel Whiteread. You’re free to explore Vienna—it’s your last night.
Saturday, July 12
8:30. Note: for observant Jews, we will make arrangements for you to fly to Sarajevo on Sunday morning
Check out of hotel, load bus, and we visit Vienna`s Heeresgeschichtliches Museum (Military Museum), where we will stand before the car in which Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914
11:15 We drive to Zagreb, arriving around 18:00 Guided tour through the old city (Gorni Grad), which looks like a mini-Prague. Dinner with members of the Zagreb Jewish Community in an outdoor restaurant that will serve Dalmatian specialties.
For those who read 1941, by Slavko Goldstein (one of the best reviewed Holocaust memoirs of last year) we will attempt to arrange a private dinner with him.
Sunday, July 13
8:30 Buses depart from the Palace Hotel in Zagreb for Sarajevo
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15:30 Arrive Sarajevo and start walking tour of Sarajevo with our scholar-in- residence, Dr Eliezer Papo. Eliezer was born in Sarajevo, and holds a doctorate in Sephardic history, and teaches, at Ben Gurion University in Israel. Our other guide will be Asmir Hasicic, president of the History Teachers’ Association in the Canton of Sarajevo
We will tour the city’s grand Ottoman-era mosques and winding alleyways lined with small shops, and then visit its Austrian-era buildings. We will stand on the very corner where Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand
19:00 Dinner in the Sarajevo Jewish community center, where we will meet those who volunteered for La Benevolencija, the Jewish humanitarian aid agency that helped an entire city during the siege, 1992-1995
We will watch our film, Survival in Sarajevo. Remarks by Jakob Finci, President of La Benevolencija, and our scholar-in-residence, Eliezer Papo
Guests to be invited include Ambassadors of the US, Spain, Greece, Poland, Germany, Austria
Keynote address: The Jews of Sarajevo, the Jews of the Balkans, by Eliezer Papo
Monday, July 14
9:00 Conference room at Europe Hotel. Teachers from Poland, Lithuania, Serbia, the US and other countries make presentations on what their students have done with video, graphic novels, walking tours. Followed by discussion
10:00 Workshop on “Making videos with your students: it’s easier than you think.”
10:45 New teachers watch our Sephardic film from Salonika, A Bookstore in Six Chapters, and discuss. Eliezer Papo on the Jewish history of Salonika
Veteran teachers meet separately. Shmuel Afek leads.
12:30 Lunch in Europe Hotel with guests
13:30 All English teachers meet together, all history teachers, all literature teachers, etc, and discuss what we have learned thus far and how we can cooperate
14:15 All groups assemble and give five minute presentations
15:30 More group work: teachers from these groups meet: --US Jewish, European Jewish and Israeli schools --US and European public schools meet 16:30 Five minute presentations by each group
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Tuesday, July 15
8:30 Bus tour: we drive past the airport to visit the Tunnel Museum. The citizens of Sarajevo burrowed a narrow tunnel under the airport during the Bosnian-Serb siege of the city, and helped keep their city alive.
10:00 We visit the Jewish cemetery, which dates from the 16th century and has tombstones unlike any other in the world. The cemetery was mined during the siege, and we think most of the mines have been removed. You can find out for yourself
13:00 Lunch at Hotel Europe
13:45 Teachers who use the film Survival in Sarajevo—from Israel, the US and Poland—tell us how their students reacted to it, and the lessons learned. Discussion on lessons of tolerance, multi-ethnicity
14:15 Visit Jewish Museum of Sarajevo, with Eliezer Papo, along with Serbian Orthodox Cathedral, Catholic Cathredal and Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque
17:00 Free until dinner
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19:00 We will have a traditional Bosnian dinner in one of the city’s coolest restaurants, accompanied by young members of the Jewish community
Wednesday, July 16
8:00 Depart by bus for Mostar, one of the most exquisite Ottoman-built towns in Europe. Badly damaged by both Serbs and Croats during the war, much of it has been rebuilt. Civil society, however, has a long way to go. The Croats have moved, en masse, to the other side of town; there is precious little cooperation between the Bosniaks and Croatians.
12:00 Depart Mostar
13:00 Lunch in roadside restaurant in Jablanica, where they serve the best lamb and grilled meats in the Balkans. Yes, chicken, kosher and vegetarian food will be provided for the faint of heart
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14:30 Return to Sarajevo
16:00 Participants arrive at Hotel Europe; coffee break followed by final feedback session What have we learned Where are we going How will we connect our students
18:30 reception in the official residence of the Spanish Ambassador to Bosnia (requested, not confirmed)
Free evening on your own for dinner
Thursday, July 17 Participants depart
Our scholar-in-residence in Sarajevo
Dr. Eliezer Papo Director, Sephardic Studies Research Institute Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Dr. Papo teaches Jewish folklore, oral Jewish literatures, and Judeo-Spanish culture at BGU, and also serves as its deputy director of the Moshe David Gaon Center for Ladino Culture. His research centers on Sephardic culture and literature. In January 2014 he received the prestigious Ben-Tzvi award for his latest book, “And Thou Shall Jest with Thy Son: Judeo- Spanish Parodies on the Passover Haggadah.” In the same week he was appointed by the Israel Ministry of Sport and Culture to be one of two representatives from Israeli academia in the National Authority for Ladino Culture.
He has published thirty articles about Sephardic culture and literature in eight languages, and four works of fiction — one in Ladino and three in Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian. Dr. Papo is also the main protagonist and moderator of the 2004 film El Ultimo Sefaradi (The Last Sephardic Jew), which focuses on the present condition of Ladino worldwide.
Born and raised in Sarajevo, Dr. Papo has a B.A. in law from the University of Sarajevo, a degree in rabbinics from the Midrash Sepharadi in Jerusalem, an M.A. in Jewish languages in literature from The Hebrew University, and a Ph.D. from BGU in Hebrew literature.
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