On 27 August, a seminar on “Understanding History and Commemorating Historical Memory” was held at the Sugihara House Museum.
The seminar “Understanding History and Commemorating Historical Memory” was targeted to the community of educational workers who were invited to participate in a seminar-internship in Israel at Yad Vashem – the International School of Holocaust Studies in Jerusalem.
The seminar was attended by Hadas Wittenberg Silverstein, Ambassador of the State of Israel in Lithuania. She told the story of her grandparents, who survived the Holocaust in Poland but lost their loved ones. The Ambassador spoke not only about the losses during the Holocaust but also about today’s current issues – the life of Israelis after 7 October 2023 – and answered the teachers’ questions.
Ingrida Vilkienė, Coordinator of Educational Programmes at the Secretariat of the International Commission, spoke about the long-standing cooperation between the International Commission and the Yad Vashem institution. The teachers were introduced to the book “From the Valley of Death to Mount Zion” by the historian Yitzhak Arad, a long-time head of Yad Vashem and a member of the International Commission, as well as to the recently subtitled Yad Vashem documentary “Tolka: The Story of Holocaust Survivor Yitzhak Arad,” which has been made available in Lithuanian.
In the second part of the seminar, the teachers took part in an excursion to the Sugihara House, visiting the exhibitions and learning about the situation in Kaunas in 1939-1940, when a large number of refugees from Poland arrived in Lithuania. According to our historian Linas Venclauskas, who led the tour, “During that period, Kaunas became “versatile” with refugees from all walks of life, and Prof. Egidijus Aleksandravičius called Kaunas of that period “the Casablanca of the North.” Educators were introduced to the personalities of Chiyune Sugihara and Jan Zwartedijk. A discussion was held about the Lithuanians who saved Jews, whose beautiful deeds and tragic fates are reflected in the exhibition “The Crystal of Kindness .”The teachers listened to a lecture on anti-Semitism in Lithuania before the Second World War by the historian Dr. Linas Venclauskas, who illustrated the lecture with examples from his book “The Case of Texts.”
Twenty teachers and education staff attended the seminar, organised by the Secretariat of the International Commission in cooperation with the Sugihara Foundation “Diplomats for Life”.
