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Event schedule

 

Download the annotated program of the CSA here:

CSA2019 annotated program

Day 1 – Monday – July 8, 2019

Introduction to the CSA in Berlin

Location: Polnisches Institut

13:00 – 14:30

Registration

Registration in our hotel, the Holiday Inn Express Alexanderplatz (Stralauer Strasse 45 Berlin 10179 ). (Click here to see how you can get to the hotel). The Centropa team is going to welcome you in the hotel lobby. Participants will receive a welcome bag with necessary materials.

Official check-in to the hotel starts at 15:00. We requested early check-in, so some participants might get their rooms earlier; in any case, luggages can be left in the hotel. 

 

14:30

Walk to the Polish Institute

15:00

Welcoming remarks

Welcome remarks by Centropa Team. Introduction of the German Jewish Source Book and the elective groups during this year’s CSA:

  1. Teaching the Holocaust in the 21st century
  2. The Kindertransports
  3. 1989: The Collapse of Communism and the Rise of Civil Society
  4. Righteous Among the Nations and Civil Courage
  5. Digital storytelling with video

15:30

Herzlich willkommen! Üdvözöljük! Sveiki! Welcome! – Getting to know one another

16:15

Screening the Centropa film of Rosa Rosenstein, a Berlin-born Jewish woman who lived through the turbulent times of Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.

16:30

Coffee break. Elective groups meet for the first time. 

17:30

Walking tour of Berlin’s Jewish quarter (Scheunenviertel) including personal stories from Centropa

19:30

Welcome dinner

21:00

Return to hotel

Day 2 – Tuesday – July 9, 2019

Location: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung

08:30

Bus leaves to KAS

09:00

Welcome remark by Katja Plate from KAS

09:15

Using the German Jewish Source Book

Explanation of everything in the source book and time for teachers to familiarize themselves with the contents so they know what they can use for their elective lessons.

09:30

Using the stories of Righteous Among the Nations in Education

Screening of Centropa film Return to Rivne, about two Jewish girls rescued by non-Jewish farmers during World War II – and their return to their hometown Rivne.

10:00

Karina Häuslmeier, the German Foreign Office’s Deputy Special Representative for Relations with Jewish Organizations, speaks to our group.

10:20

Coffee break

10:45

Elective group work

12:30

Jewish Soviet soldiers in Berlin

We will discuss interview excerpts of Jewish Soviet soldiers in Berlin, along with a discussion of Centropa’s film, “Jewish Soldier´s Red Star” about Arnold Fabrikant from Odessa, who fought for the Red Army in World War II. Keynote remarks by Mischa Gabowitsch of the Einstein Forum Potsdam.

13:00

Lunch

14:00

Excursion to the Soviet War Memorial in Treptow & German-Russian Museum Karlshorst

The vast Stalinist memorial park was built for the 55,000 Soviet soldiers that fell taking Berlin in 1945. The park also serves as a cemetery of 7000 soldiers. In the park, our guide will be Mischa Gabowitsch.


Later we visit the building where on 8 May 1945, the High Command of the German Wehrmacht signed a document of unconditional surrender in front of representatives of the four Allied powers in the main hall of the officers’mess of a Wehrmacht military engineering training facility. From 1945 to 1949 the building was the headquarters of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany. In 1994,  with the final withdrawal of the Russian troops the Museum Berlin-Karlshorst Association was established, and on 10 May 1995, for the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, the German Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst opened. In 2013 a newly conceived permanent exhibition was presented to the public.

Website: http://www.museum-karlshorst.de/

18:00

Bus transfer to hotel. Enjoy discovering Berlin in the evening! Here are our suggestions.

Day 3 – Wednesday – July 10, 2019

Location: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung

09:00

The Centropa Berlin City Search

Interactive scavenger hunt of Berlin Mitte including various historic sites.

11:00

We meet at Anhalter Bahnhof

We will read Kindertransport stories of Jewish children sent to England between 1938 and 1939 from this train station. We will also discuss the deportations of German Jews that took place in the 1940s from the same site.

12:00

Lunch at FES

13:00

Welcome remarks by Michele Auga, head of the North America Department of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

13:15

Local institutions present Holocaust education projects

Local institutions present projects on teaching and commemorating Jewish history and the Holocaust. Teachers can walk around and learn about the activities they are most interested in.

Guests:

  • Dr. Carmen Smiatacz (Institute for the History of the German Jews). 
  • Dr. Marta Ansilewska (Silent Heroes Memorial Center Berlin)
  • Sophia Schmitz (Aktives Museum Berlin / Stolperstein Coordination Center)
  • Prof. Stephan Lehnstädt (Touro College Berlin)

14:15

Welcome remarks by FES representative

14:30

A special event with Kindertransport survivors

Special event with four Kindertransport survivors in cooperation with the Goethe Institute and the German Embassy in London. We will screen a Centropa Kindertransport film. Our participants will split up in four groups to meet with the two Kindertransport survivors, who will share their stories with us.

Learn more about our guests: Kindertransport survivors

15:30

Coffee and cake with Kindertransport survivors

16:30

We will award the winning team from the Scavenger Hunt 

16:45

Marketplace of Ideas

Veteran teachers from Europe, US and Israel will present different projects they did with their students based on Centropa materials. 15 minutes per presentation. Participants get to choose which project their want to learn more about.

18:00

Bus returns to hotel. Enjoy your evening in Berlin!

Day 4 – Thursday – July 11, 2019

Location: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung

08:15

Bus departs

09:00

Experts panel. Our subject: Immigration in Germany, immigration elsewhere. Does it work? Has it worked? Why has it become the hot button issue today?

In the summer of 2018, the infamous protests that took place in Chemnitz, Saxony, reignited the tensions in Germany which had been ongoing since 2015 surrounding the European migrant crisis. Ed Serotta will moderate a panel discussion comparing how different countries deal with the migration situation, and with the rise of the far right.

Our guest speakers:

  • Kate Brady (Deutsche Welle)
  • Luisa Beck (Washington Post)
  • Guy Chazan (Financial Times)
  • Thomas Greven (FES)

10:30

Coffee break

11:00

Elective group work

13:00

Lunch at FES

14:00

Bus departs

14:15

Visit the Topography of Terror Museum

Between 1933 and 1945, the central institutions of Nazi persecution and terror – the Secret State Police Office with its own “house prison,” the leadership of the SS and, during the Second World War, the Reich Security Main Office –  were located on the present-day grounds of the “Topography of Terror” that are next to the Martin Gropius Building and close to Potsdamer Platz.

Museum website: http://www.topographie.de/en/

15:45

Participants walk to Holocaust Memorial 

16:00

Visit the underground Information Centre of the Holocaust Memorial

The underground Ort der Information (Information Centre) complements the abstraction of the memorial with personal documentation about individuals and families. This includes biographical details, recordings and information about memorial sites throughout Germany and Europe. Documenting the universal issue of genocide, the centre represents a central focus on the diverse memorial sites across Germany which stress the living memory aspect of remembrance.

Participants explore the exhibition on their own.

17:15

Reflection session in the conference room of the Information Centre

18:30

Berlin is all yours! Free evening.

Day 5 – Friday – July 12, 2019

 

08:15 – 13:00

20th Century History through the art, people, and sites of Berlin

Participants take part in the tour based on their preferences indicated in the registration form. Each group visits a site that was immensely popular during previous CSAs in Berlin. Centropa staff will provide directions and day passes for public transport.

Schöneberg´s “Street sign memorials”
In 1993, Berlin-based artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock inaugurated their “Places of Remembrance” memorial. Today you can see the 80 signs that are hung on lamp posts throughout the Bavarian Quarter, each one spelling out one of the hundreds of Nazi laws and rules that dehumanized Berlin’s Jewish population. Here, you can see Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt’s houses alongside all the signage commemorating the laws that limited Jewish daily life.
Check out this 2013 interview by the New York Review of Books with the artists!

7xjung – Your Training Ground for Solidarity and Respect
7xjung offers intense workshops for dealing with the past times of National Socialism, as well as with the present-day issues of identity, exclusion and civil courage. They advocate that everyone can be an agent of change by expressing and discussing new perspectives on history, the present, the individual and personal possibilities of shaping society in a wholly democratic way.
More information: http://www.7xjung.de/en/?lang=en

Jewish Museum Berlin
The Jewish Museum Berlin opened in 2001 and is the largest Jewish museum in Europe. Please note that the permanent exhibition of the museum is currently under construction, so that the two upper levels of the Libeskind Building will not be accessible for us to visit. You can still visit the architectural highlights of the Libeskind Building – the Axes in the basement, the Garden of Exile, and the impressive Voids – as well as the current exhibitions and art installations. 

13:00

Free afternoon! Find our suggestions of what to see here. 

18:00

We meet at Pestalozzi Str. Synagogue

Participants arrange their travel to the synagogue on their own. Address: Pestalozzistraße 14, 10625 Berlin.

What to bring: Your passports or IDs for security check

How to dress:
– Women, please wear a dress or skirt that covers your knee, and have something to cover your shoulders and elbow.
– Men, no need for a tie, but wear a nice shirt and pants. You need to cover your head in the synagogue – you can bring your own hat, or get a kippah in the synagogue.

18:15

Welcome remarks by Rabbi Jonah Sievers 

19:00

Shabbat service at Pestalozzi Str. Synagogue

Shabbat service at Pestalozzi Str. Synagogue, the last classic German liberal service with the liturgy composed by Cantor Lewandowski. Rabbi Jonah Sievers will welcome our group.

20:15

Shabbat dinner at Filmbühne Am Steinplatz

21:45

Bus returns to hotel

Day 6 – Saturday – July 13. 2019

Location: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung

09:00

Bus leaves from hotel

09:45

Visit the House of the Wannsee Conference

In this house – a former industrialist’s villa built in 1915 and used from 1941 to 1945 by the SS as a conference centre – on 20th January 1942, fifteen high-ranking representatives of the SS, the NSDAP and various ministries met to discuss their cooperation in the planned deportation and murder of the European Jews. Through original documents and audiovisual presentations, the Memorial Site’s exhibit documents the history of the National Socialist persecution of Jews, the deportations to ghettos and the murder of the European Jews in German-controlled territories.

Participants view the permanent exhibition, followed by reflection discussion in small groups.

13:00

Lunch at KAS

14:15

Reflection discussion

Participants meet in small groups to discuss the morning visit.They will also discuss the assigned book “The Holocaust – A German historian examines the genocide” by Wolfgang Benz, with particular reference to the chapter on the Wannsee Conference.

15:00

Elective group work

15:45

Coffee break

16:15

Elective groups finalize their presentations for the final conference

18:15

Free evening in Berlin – enjoy!

Day 7 – Sunday – July 14, 2019

Location: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung

08:30

Lunch at KAS

09:00

The Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989

Remembering the Cold War and 1989: we will visit the small open air exhibition and the memorial plaque at “Platz des 9. November” near the former border checkpoint Bornholmer Street – where the wall was opened in 1989. We will then visit the Berlin Wall memorial site at Bernauer Straße, followed by a visit to the Palace of Tears at Friedrichstr.

The Berlin Wall Memorial is the central memorial site of German division, located in the middle of the capital. Situated at the historic site on Bernauer Strasse, it extends along 1.4 kilometers of the former border strip. The memorial contains the last piece of Berlin Wall with the preserved grounds behind it and is thus able to convey an impression of how the border fortifications developed until the end of the 1980s. The events that took place here together with the preserved historical remnants and traces of border obstacles on display help to make the history of Germany’s division comprehensible to visitors.

Website: http://www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/en/

The Tränenpalast – “The Palace of Tears” – was constructed in 1962 at Friedrichstraße train station in Berlin, and served the GDR dictatorship until 1990 as a departure terminal for people leaving the GDR for West Berlin. Like no other location, the pavilion serves as a reminder of the partition of Germany and of all the fates connected with it.

Website: https://www.hdg.de/en/traenenpalast/

12:00

Lunch at KAS

13:00

Screening of the new 1989 Centropa film

30 years ago, the Democratic revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin wall dramatically changed the political landscape in Europe. With the collapse of Communism, Jews now regained the freedom to exercise their religion after decades of suppression. But while some local Jewish communities slowly started to grow again, tens of thousands of Russians Jews emigrated to Germany since 1991.

13:20

Cold War / Berlin 1989 online quiz

14:20

Regional groups meet to discuss Centropa programming specific to their countries/areas

15:20

Coffee break

16:00

Final presentations by elective groups

17:30

Watching the films of the video elective

18:00

Final verbal feedback session together

18:45

Final dinner at KAS

19:45

Return to hotel. Enjoy your last night in Berlin!

Day 8 – Monday – July 15, 2019

Departure

Until 10:00

Participants check out and depart

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Contact Us

+43 1 4090 971
office@centropa.org