On 30-31 July, a group of Lithuanian teachers took part in a seminar, “History of the 20th Century Lithuania in Western and Central Lithuania”.
The two-day seminar started in Ariogala, from where the participants travelled to Palanga with the aim of learning about the history of the Jews of Palanga – tracing the Jewish heritage. The group of educators visited sites related to the Jews who lived in Palanga: amber workshops, a lemonade brewery, the Palanga power plant, and the site of the former synagogues. The museum tour was complemented by the stories of Vilius Gutmanas, the chairman of the Jewish community of Palanga, about his family and relatives’ stories related to pre-war Palanga. The old Jewish cemetery and the site of the Holocaust victims on the shore of the Baltic Sea were visited.
On the second day of the seminar, they started in Lyduvėnai, a very small town with about half a thousand inhabitants in Soviet times. Visiting the Lyduvėnai railway bridge, the teachers heard stories about the German occupational government’s attitude towards the bridge’s significance, its blowing up, and its rebuilding during the second Soviet era. Later, the seminar participants visited the Book museum in the Raseiniai Marcelijus Martinaitis library and participated in an educational programme about Magdė oš Raseiniai.
Such an event is organized annually for the communities of the Tolerance Education Centres to discover interesting and thematically important places in Lithuania. Thirty-two teachers and educators from all over Lithuania took part in the seminar, which was organized by the Secretariat of the International Commission in cooperation with the Tolerance Education Centre of Ariogala Gymnasium.
