Building on the success of our youth projects in Ukraine in 2008-9, Lo Tishkach is expanding its activities to involve many more hundreds of students and young people in 2009-10 in the Baltic States while consolidating our presence across Ukraine.
Key projects in Latvia and Lithuania will see groups of young people spread out across the Baltic States during 2010 in a vast enterprise to survey all the cemeteries and mass graves in this area. Over 600 individual sites will be visited, surveyed and photographed backed up by top-level educational seminars encouraging participants to reflect on the area’s rich Jewish heritage and the lessons of the Holocaust.
Similar projects will begin at the same time, taking in the Carpathian Mountain region near the Romanian and Slovak borders in western Ukraine, the central oblasts of Cherkasy and Chernihiv, and the once vast pre-Holocaust Jewish community in the industrial centre of Dnipropetrovsk in the east. Local partners VAAD of Ukraine; the Jewish Foundation of Ukraine and the Dnipropetrovsk Jewish Community will involve hundreds of Jewish youth in these surveys, many taking place during summer camps alongside seminars on local Jewish history and identity.
Continuing on from a 2008-9 project which saw youth leaders from Ukrainian minority youth movements engage with the country’s Jewish history in the cradle of Hasidism in Podolia, these youth leaders will stage photo exhibitions, lectures and school visits in cities across Ukraine. This project is co-ordinated by the Ukrainian Union of Jewish Students.
And as part of Lo Tishkach’s commitment to building a local young generation to take responsibility for their own heritage in the longer-term, a teacher-training project will see history teachers from across the country attending Lo Tishkach seminars to learn new teaching models to impart Jewish culture to the next generation. Together, they will share ideas to take innovative programming tools into Jewish school summer camps in July and August 2010 while incorporating these models into their school curricula in the new academic year.
These second year projects will increase the number of young participants eightfold over the first year, while vastly expanding the critical work of surveying sites leading to the long-term identification and protection of Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust mass grave sites throughout the former Soviet Union.
For further information on each 2009-10 project click here.
