Event schedule

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. 

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

Interactive scavenger hunt of Berlin Mitte including various historic sites.

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.

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)

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

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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/

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.