Using Edward Serotta's photographs from the synagogue in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war of the 1990s, students will study several pictures carefully, answer questions and use what they learn in a creative writing assignment.  Photographs can be found and downloaded from the special website for Centropa's Survival in Sarajevo exhbition: http://upload.centropa.org/upload/centropa-sarajevo/Centropa.org___Sarajevo/Sarajevo_home.html

In these two back-to-back lessons, students will explore Jewish values, Jewish identity, and the question of how to balance their ethnic/religious identities with being a citizen of the world.  Students will watch Centropa's film, Survival in Sarajevo: Friendship in a Time of War - the powerful story of how a small group of Holocaust survivors and their children worked with their Christian and Muslim neighbors to save each other and their city during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s.

Students make a 3-5 minute film that tells the story of a family member.  We start the project by showing Centropa films as models for short films that tell a compelling story through narrative, visual and audio elements.  Students interview family members, learn to craft a compelling story about their family, write the narration, collect the photographs and visual images, choose appropriate music and edit everything using film-making software.  We conclude the project by having a film festival where we invite parents and each student film is shown.  Through this project

Interwar Hungary produced some of the best modernist photographers: Imre Kertesz, Robert Capa, and Laszlo Moholy Nagy. All were Jewish. Another great Jewish Hungarian photographer of the period was Imre Kinszki, whose life and career was cut short when he vanished in the last months of WW2 during a death march. His reputation faded. In this project, students learn about the modernist artistic styles of these important photographers, and research their life stories.

In this 45 minute lesson, high school students explore two important aspects of survivors’ lives: 1) rebuilding their lives after living through horrors and losing their families, and 2) sharing their stories. Students will watch the Centropa film, So Memory Doesn’t Die, and read excerpts from the interview with Toska Silberring to explore how Toska rebuilt her life and why she chose to speak about her experiences. 

In this unit, selected 8th grade students worked with three teachers to prepare a multimedia presentation for the middle school using Centropa materials in observance of Yom Hashoah. The students read through Centropa interviews and watched related films. They then wrote a script using the interviews and created a slide presentation that was shown while students read brief biographies based on the interviews.

In this project Jewish middle/high school students explore Jewish life in Europe, the Holocaust, and post-war immigrant life in America through the experiences of local Holocaust survivors from Central or Eastern Europe.  The students take primary source material from the survivors’ oral history testimonies and combine that with background historical study.  They use this material to create short films telling the life stories of the survivors before, during, and after the Holocaust.  Essentially, students perform the work of historians in transforming the raw data of history

This lesson asks students to research family history and to create a project that tells the story of his/her family origins. Using the Centropa films about Max Uri and Jozsef Faludi students examine issues regarding Jewish identity and cheder (Jewish religious school) and students compare specific issues in the films with their own lives today. Then, the lesson employs Centropa-inspired techniques to ask students to create their own short films about their personal family history.

This lesson aims to enlighten students about Sephardic history in the Balkans, and was originally taught in the context of a Jewish day school in the United States.  The Jews expelled from Spain who settled in the Balkans were welcomed, and Jews were generally accepted as part of society, as they were in all parts of the Ottoman Empire.