(JTA) – Some 65 teachers from countries of the former Yugoslavia attended a seminar for Holocaust educators at the Holocaust Museum in Skopje, Macedonia.
The seminar, held over the weekend, was organized by Centropa, a Vienna-based research and education center that fosters teaching about Jewish heritage and history through interactive technology.
Centropa director Edward Serotta said 50 of the teachers came from Macedonia, with the others from Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia.
Serotta told JTA that the seminar was part of a program being carried out by Centropa to bring teachers and students from ex-Yugoslavia together through a grant from the Balkan Trust for Democracy, the International Task Force on Holocaust Education and the Claims Conference.
“The teachers pledged to create partnerships between their schools,” Serotta said. “Most of them have had little contact with teachers in other former Yugoslav republics since the 1990s.”
Serotta said the Skopje seminar was the first of four teacher-training seminars organized by Centropa this month that will involve about 250 students and teachers.
The other seminars, from a grant to Centropa from the U.S. State Department, are scheduled to take place Tuesday at the Holocaust Museum in Budapest; May 18-19 in Vilnius, in partnership with the Jewish community and the Sholem Aleichem school; and May 24 at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw in partnership with Krakow’s Galicia Jewish Museum.
