|
|
THE ORIGINAL APPEAL
In 1999 The Education and Cultural Centre of the Jewish Museum in Prague offered the students of Czech and Moravian schools to take part in a unique project called the Neighbours Who Disappeared. This updated appeal can be a motivation for you as well.
The appeal to schools
The Education and Cultural Centre of the Jewish Museum in Prague and the NGO Zapomenutí propose to you to participate in a unique project Neighbour Who Disappeared. This project is a social phenomenon of the Czech Republic. Tracking down the vanishing traces of the Jewish populace in the Czech lands might be an interesting source of new knowledge and associations for contemporary young people, in the light of its strong pre-war assimilation, the sudden fatal turn of events and the shadow over the years of 1945-1989.
The project's aim is to offer students aged between 12 and 18 the chance to form new questions on the basis of information that is acquired from the first hand and from a specific locality. Questions about the lives and fates of people who were a notable part of the social life of Czech and Moravian municipalities and then, after long generations of close neighbourship, they were suddenly gone.
Individual or team work on the project inspires the participants to:
take interest into something else than their "self" yet, paradoxically, it also emphasizes self-identity, the personal input and the search of one's place in this world
find out, whether it is really possible to find something particular in the nearest surroundings, in the district archive, at the building office, in the databases of the Jewish museum in Prague, the Jewish Community of Prague, the Terezín Memorial or in the Pinkas synagogue and whether a young person may address these institutions personally or only through an adult mediator.
interview the older generation that experienced World War II directly; young people often do not ask their grandparents without being inspired to.
find documents that would be lost otherwise.
find out that knowledge is exciting!
The adults (teachers and workers in archives and the Jewish Museum in Prague, members of Jewish Communities, contemporaries, chroniclers) are mainly here to help access information (the Internet, archives, collections) about the subject. Schools can present their results on a website linked to ours.
Students collect testimonies of living witnesses about their neighbours and the events that took place during the War. They also collect documents, photographs, journals, letters etc. The results, in a form of a literary-investigative work, become unique and authentic illustration of a tragic chapter of mankind's history. You can become a co-author of a school website about disappeared neighbours from your local area.
The main task of The Education and Cultural Centre of the Jewish Museum in Prague is to present the project's results in cooperation with NGOs and the local administrations, aid with the preparation of publications, exhibitions and films. We perceive the project and its social appreciation, among other things, as an important counterbalance to various forms of violence.
|
