Youth Meeting on Remembrance in Multicultural Societies

This youth meeting project is bringing together two groups of 14 young people from Germany and Israel respectively for already the second time. The goal is to find ways of remembering the persecution and murder of the European Jews which correspond to the needs of young people living in societies characterised by diversity. For there is not just one perspective, one unique stereotype or one sole narrative about the Nazi past, but rather a whole range of different points of view. This can be the result of social, cultural or political factors or due to personal or family reasons. Recognising and understanding such factors thus forms the start of an initially metaphorical journey, which takes in the stories of the participants’ backgrounds during preparatory seminars, before the actual journey begins in the form of a study trip to Israel. It is here that the students of the Schiller Gymnasium in Berlin and the Sulam Zor School in Western Galilee work on proposals for a culture of remembrance in keeping with their own experiences and needs. 

The project is also a journey for those who have developed it: the young staff at the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site in Berlin in collaboration with the Mul Nevo social and education centre in Tel Aviv. For them, it’s about trying out new approaches to political educational work and documenting them for others active in the field. To this end, the groups of participants are put together with diversity in mind, with the thematic agenda straddling both past and the present as well as different sociological and psychosocial factors. And that’s not all: before the encounter takes place, the students develop a script for a documentary film about their collaboration, which one of the participants will then shoot.  

“Youth Meeting on Remembrance in Multicultural Societies” 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. Two groups of 14 students from the Schiller Gymnasium in Berlin and the Sulam Zor School in Western Galilee respectively meet in Israel for seminars, workshops, encounters and visits. The study trip is preceded by preparatory seminars and is concluded with a report of the goals, methods and findings as well as a documentary film.