Teacher blog

photo taken by Victor Bayon, on November 22, 2009, CC licensing

photo taken by Allie Coremin, on January 10, 2011, CC licensing

Adapted from The Sephardi Culinary Tradition by Elsie Menasce (The Sephardic Cookbook Corporation, South Africa, 1984)

Article about the project of the students from National College "Iulia Hasdeu" Lugoj in Yad Vashem Magazine - page 10.

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/pressroom/magazine/74/online.asp

Dear Anthony 

Thank you for your moving words . 

In June of 2014, a story broke on most providers which could only be described as troubling. Three Israeli teens were kidnapped and killed in the West Bank. Innocents tend to fan flames quite quickly. A detachment of soldiers is shot at, with a few casualties? Not as big of a story; they are soldiers, that is the life they have been fated. But kids... They tend to pull at heartstrings and push people towards rash decisions. One of the articles I read referenced the teens as a 'Franz Ferdinand Moment'. Bring on Centropa CSA 2014.

It has been over a week since the conclusion of the 2014 Centropa Summer Academy. It probably will be many more weeks until I can truly process everything that was seen, felt, experienced and learned during the trip. It is rare that a place can blow you away, exceeding any expectations that you may have. Even more rare is it happening in three different cities.

When I started to work in school as a teacher I was told that there is only way to find out am I good in this job. "If your students leave your class feeling and thinking differently, you achieved your goal", a school psychologist ( an expert for an active learning) told me.

Well, I have been several times in Sarajevo, but this time I came back home totaly changed.  Different. Something happened to me. Centropa is obviously extremely good in its work. 

Eight days with Centropa were so full of activities, meetings, new information that I am still trying to summarize all the things in my head. What was summer academy about? WWI? Austro-Hungarian Empire? Austrian cultural heritage? Balkans history? War in Sarajevo? Sephardic Jews? I wake up at night and can't realise at first where I am: at home or in a hotel in Sarajevo. And I feel nostalgia for people I met and for  things we did.

About our discussions in Sarajevo...

Following the arrest and trial of Princip and the other assassins and conspirators, he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. He was sent to the former fortress of Terezin (later the notorious Nazi show ghetto of Theresienstadt). He died there of tuberculosis in 1916 and was buried in an unmarked grave. But a symapthetic guard noted the location and the body was later disinterred and mved to Sarajevo, where he and his fellow conspirators now overlook the fruits of their handiwork.