Remembrance and Diversity in German-Israeli Youth Exchange

Young people remember things differently. The young staff at the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site and Mul Nevo social and education centre in Tel Aviv were already able to gain some initial experience on this subject in 2012 during the preceding “Youth Meeting on Remembrance in Multicultural Societies” project that took place in Israel. Now the Israeli group is making the return visit to Berlin: 14 pupils from the Sulam Zor school in Western Galilee and the 14 young people taking part from the Berlin Schiller Gymnasium meet up again in Berlin and Brandenburg. 

The task is a similar one: they develop forms of remembering the Holocaust in keeping with both their age and the diversity of their cultural and social backgrounds in seminars, workshops, meetings on location and visits. The committed work carried out by the young educational professionals forms the core of the project, who developed its pedagogical underpinnings, lead the group through the meeting and subsequently summarise and document the findings obtained. For this is what this project is all about for its initiators: providing new impulses for a culture of remembrance which takes the experiences and needs of young people seriously and incorporates them into professional concepts for innovative youth education work. The analysis of traditional remembrance discourses in Israel and Germany plays an important role here, as do the diverse daily surroundings of these young people: new ideas are always based on an understanding of old and existing ones. Imparting complex knowledge is thus the order of the day for the young educational multipliers who lead the workshop, paired with intensive cooperation with the school children. In the end, both sides benefit from new approaches to youth education work. 


“Remembrance and Diversity in German-Israeli Youth Exchange” is a project by the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site in collaboration with the Mul Nevo social and education centre in Tel Aviv and takes place between March 1 and September 1, 2013. The goal of the project is to offer additional training for young professionals working in education and cultures of remembrance and enable them to form networks. They start off by preparing the 14 school children from Germany and Israel respectively for the meeting separately and then accompany them to Berlin as they take part in workshops as well as numerous additional activities. The project is the continuation of the “Youth Meeting on Remembrance in Multicultural Societies” project from 2012 and is to be concluded with a publication in three languages on its goals, methods, and findings.