Centropa in Education
Preserving Jewish Memory
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Bringing History to Life
Centropa offers a web-based educational program designed for schools in Europe, North America and Israel. We encourage teachers to teach European-Jewish history in the 20th century in an interdisciplinary way, and we design our materials to be innovative, interactive and international.
International Teacher Training
Centropa's seminars for teachers began in the summer of 2007, when we invited nine US high school teachers to Vienna and Budapest to give us feedback on our website and Centropa's early films. Since then, our education programs have grown each year and we now conduct local workshops, national, and international seminars in the US, Europe and Israel, and each year we bring together 70-75 educators from approximately 17 countries for our annual Summer Academy in Central Europe.
Our programs are available in English, Hebrew, German, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish, Lithuanian and Romanian.
Teachers use our materials to teach history, languages (German, English as a second language. Spanish), language arts, ethics and values, Holocaust, 20th century Jewish history, film-making, and photography.
Interactive Student Projects
Our program is supplemented by an interactive project site where students can upload their own projects, comment on other school projects, and get in touch with each other. In our Border Jumping Community, you can find student projects from all over the world, documented through photos, videos, power point presentations, and texts.
Innovative Online Platform
Our educational program is based on the over 1,200 interviews with Jewish Holocaust survivors and over 24,000 of their family pictures that Centropa collected since 2000. We have then turned some of the most compelling biographies into short multimedia films that are being used in more than 500 schools in 20 countries. So far, we offer more than 30 short, biographical films about European-Jewish family stories, as well as 10 brief documentary films. All films are between 3 and 30 minutes long and can easily be used in various educational settings, such as public schools, Jewish schools, Jewish congregational schools, university classes, and adult education.
You will find all our films at www.centropa.org/centropa-cinema and you can download them free of charge.
All photos and biographies can be found at www.centropa.org/search-our-database-jewish-memory.
Our goals
Although we have somewhat different goals with each network of teachers we work with, our three universal goals are:
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to connect us all to the lands of Jewish heritage by creating programs about the entire 20th century, not only about the period of the Third Reich;
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to use work with teachers all over the world to use Centropa's materials in innovative ways so that Holocaust education will have relevance everywhere;
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to combat antisemitism and Holocaust denial by creating programs that students carry out themselves, and share with other students across borders, oceans, and ethnic divides.
We are currently working
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in public, charter, private and parochial schools throughout the United States, with a current special emphasis on schools in Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Baltimore, Houston, Los Angeles, and New jersey;
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in European public schools in: Austria, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia, Greece, North-Macedonia, Ukraine and Moldova;
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with teacher trainers, curriculum writers, museum educators, as well as US city, county, and state school boards and European ministries of education;
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in public schools throughout Israel;
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in Jewish middle and high schools throughout North America;
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in Jewish elementary and high schools in England, Finland, Sweden, Russia, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czech Republic, Germany, Croatia;
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Jewish supplementary schools and adult education programs in the United States.
If you would like to have more information about our educational programs, please contact:
Fabian Rühle
Fabian Rühle, Centropa's European Education Director, develops materials and runs seminars for teachers all over Europe. He is also our liaison for European governments and foundations, and he coordinates our fundraising in Europe. In 2015, he opened our Germany office and is now based in Hamburg.
Dr. Lauren Granite
Dr. Lauren Granite directs our US educational programs. Since 2010 she has expanded our US network, originally consisting of Jewish day and congregational schools, to include public, parochial and charter schools. She organizes and runs workshops and seminars, mentors teachers,
writes lessons, develops cross-cultural and projects and programs, and works with teacher advisory teams who advise us about latest trends in various school subjects, from history to art.
Dr. Maria Lieberman
Mirus (Maria) Lieberman is the head of our Budapest office. She is the director of CJN, Centropa’s network of European Jewish schools, and oversees our educational programs for Hungarian public schools. Together with her team she organises and runs seminars, trainings and workshops for teachers and students, develops cross-border projects and programs. She is also responsible for our programs in Israel.