Centropa seminar in Columbia, South Carolina

Educators in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia were invited to join us at our seminar at the University of South Carolina, 16-18 February. More than 30 teachers came together to learn how to use Centropa’s stories of 20th century Central European Jewish life to teach history, ELA, social studies, civics, art, photography, film, storytelling, and foreign language. Topics included: Jews in Germany (in preparation for our 2018 Summer Academy in Berlin); Jim Crow / Nuremberg Laws: what can students learn from these two examples of legal discrimination?; stories of when friends, neighbors, teachers, and other community members turned against our interviewees - and stories of when they were helped by friends, neighbors and complete strangers; stories of Sephardic Jewish life in the Balkans, and the model of civic engagement that happened in the synagogue of Sarajevo during the 1990s Bosnian war when the Jews opened their synagogue to Muslims, Croats, and Serbs as they worked together to survive.