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In March, a ceremony was held in Tomaszów Lubelski and Pawłówka to commemorate the burial place of three Jewish children: Rywka, Balka and Jankiel, murdered during the Holocaust and buried near their home in Pawłówka. The culmination of the educational workshops was the ceremony of marking this place with a wooden matzeva. The workshops and the ceremony were attended by students of the 1st High School in Lublin and students of the Primary School in Michalów, school directors, representatives of local authorities, museum employees, several residents, teachers and a local choir. A prayer for the dead was sung in Hebrew and Psalm 23 was read by the student.
These were the first workshops carried out by the Zapomniane Foundation as part of the MultiMemo – Multidirectional Memory Project, implemented thanks to the support of the European Union under the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) program in partnership with FestivALT, Urban Memory Foundation, JCC Warsaw, Fundacja Formy Wspólne, Foundation for the Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries, CEJI, JULIUS-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITAT WURZBURG and Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg.

We would also like to thank the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute and the donor Szlomo-Albam-Stiftung for co-financing the workshops in Pawłówka “Reference Points” – creating a wooden matzevot.

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The first evaluation meeting of the “NeDiPa” project was held as a two-part event, consisting of an internal evaluation carried out among project partners and meetings with project partners and stakeholders.

As part of the event, the Typology of Difficult Heritage Sites was presented to the stakeholders. The document can be downloaded below.

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The first meeting as part of the MultiMemo project: Multidirectional Memory – Remembering for Social Justice financed from European funds is behind us.
At the meeting, which took place on February 19-20, 2023 in Warsaw, together with the partners of the consortium (eight organizations participating in the project) we presented the assumptions of the project to key stakeholders dealing with heritage and invited them to cooperate.

The main assumption of the MultiMemo project is to discuss and initiate various forms of active commemoration in public space in several European countries. While focusing on supporting and proposing a practice-based culture of remembrance, innovative collaborative strategies and a multidisciplinary, cross-cutting approach to building a heritage community, combining civic activism, academia, art and urbanism.

We started the event with walks around two Jewish cemeteries, Okopowa and Bródno, focused on the topic of approach to remembrance, the concept of green commemorations and various types of commemoration.

We are glad that, thanks to the support of the European Union, we will organize 47 events together with our partners over the next two years:
FestivALT, the Urban Memory Foundation, JCC Warsaw, the Formy Common Foundation, the Foundation for the Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries, CEJI, JULIUS-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITAT WURZBURG and the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg.

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The second meeting of the NeDiPa project: Negotiating Difficult Pasts, which took place on December 13, 2022 in Krakow, is behind us. The purpose of the meeting was to present the current project activities to key organizations, people and initiatives operating in the area of remembrance and care for Jewish heritage in Poland, for discussion. Together with the stakeholders, we discussed the next steps, including risks.

We also invited the creators of the show Alte Hajm / Stary Dom, to the meeting, about the difficult Polish-Jewish heritage, which was presented in Krakow during the Divine Comedy Festival (this year’s theme is “Polish Taboo”). We talked about negotiating the difficult past, especially about how to use art to raise and open topics that are uncomfortable, suppressed and burdened with trauma. The meeting with director Marcin Wierzchowski and theater artist Michael Ruebenfeld was hosted by theater critic Jacek Wakar. In every old house, like layers of paint, successive chapters of family and local history are written. Although not every house is a traditionally understood monument, it can, along with its past, be an example of what is sometimes called “difficult heritage”. It is a kind of legacy that we inherit from the past, which may be inconvenient, difficult, embarrassing for us, which we may want to hide from the world or avoid becoming the subject of public narratives, such as commemorations. This type of legacy may concern both private and family history, as well as the history of entire communities.

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As part of the NeDiPa project, we had the pleasure of participating in the meeting on November 16, 2022 “PLACES OF DIFFICULT MEMORY – HOW TO DESIGN, HOW TO TALK?”, organized by the Urban Memory Foundation in the Oppenheim tenement house in Wrocław. The Urban Memory Foundation organized this event in cooperation with OP ENHEIM, architects from Wrocław and the Lower Silesian Architecture Festival – DOFA. We spent the afternoon talking about the theme of DOFy – “City of Solidarity” in the context of connecting pre-war Breslau with contemporary Wrocław and its inhabitants. We discussed the conservation of monuments and related challenges in Wrocław and Lower Silesia. We talked about the interpretation of Jewish law (halakha) in relation to burial sites and the application of non-invasive research practices in the field for this type of burial site. In turn, during the panel with architects and experts, we discussed, among others: about remembrance, about the need to inventory the pre-war cemeteries of our city; we studied the complicated situation of the Jewish cemetery at ul. Gwarna (formerly Claassenstrasse) and possible design directions and approaches to places of difficult heritage in Wrocław, in Europe and in the world. We invite you to listen to the audio from the meeting and watch the photo report on fb. It is an honor for us to be a partner of this event together with FestivALT.

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In November, we prepared a green commemoration of the forest hideout, which became the burial site of seven Jews from Modliborzyce in Pikule (Janów Lubelski commune). Thanks to cooperation with landscape architect Natalia Budnik we marked the location of the dugout/burial with plants so that it fits into the local landscape.

On November 4, 2022, during the ceremony of unveiling the monument/tombstone, we commemorated the victims together. The ceremony was attended by its co-organizers, the Regional Museum in Janów Lubelski, the Janów Lubelski Forest Inspectorate, as well as the local authorities of Janów Lubelski and neighboring communes, representatives of the clergy, including Rabbi Yehoshua Ellis and the Bishop Mieczysław Cisło, youth from the 1st High School in Janów Lubelski, representatives of Jewish organizations, local community.

It was the second commemoration carried out as part of the “NeDiPa: Negotiating Difficult Pasts” project, thanks to the support of the European Commission under the program The Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV). We would like to thank our partners FestivALT & Urban Memory Foundation for their help and support in the implementation of the event.

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In autumn 2022 FestivALT organized a two-part, in-person event in Krakow. The first event took place on 15-16 October and was conceptualized as an outdoor showcase of green commemoration practices, while the second part was an academic conference, organized on 6-8 November in cooperation with several local partners, going deeper into the topic of green commemorations. During the 2-day outdoor event at the former KL Plaszow camp site we were promoting alternative and artistic strategies for the transmission of memory in green spaces. We demonstrated a practice-based culture of remembrance that harnesses innovative strategies of cooperation and a multidisciplinary approach to heritage and community building; seamlessly integrating Civic Arts, Activism and Urbanism. The main topic of the “Green Commemoration – Challenges of the Difficult Heritage Conference ” was to outline a framework by which to approach the difficult heritage of the former camps and other commemorated and uncommemorated sites of the Holocaust. A wide range of artists, activists, researchers and experts were involved in the series of events.

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Between October 2022 and January 2023 the Urban Memory Foundation, in partnership with the Zapomniane Foundation and the FestivAlt Association, organized a series of events in Wrocław aimed at various audiences, related to the main theme of the “Difficult Heritage” series.. The key event was a conference held on 12 October, “Difficult Heritage. Jewish Breslauers and Other Local Stories, Contexts and Activities” which brought together in panel discussions and lectures scholars, activists, city representatives, architects and designers (audio material and photos are available). The conference received the patronage of the Regional Representation of the European Commission in Poland. The series included walks with guides around Jewish Wrocław, guided tours of the works “Three Earths” by the artist Anna Schapiro for the Jewish cemetery at Gwarna Street and sessions with students. The events were aimed at raising awareness and knowledge among participants about definitions, civic heritage initiatives and places of difficult heritage – focusing on Jewish heritage – in Wrocław, Poland and Europe.

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Code of conduct of the consortium and partners and stakeholders of the NeDiPa project 2022-2024

Together with the partners of the “NeDiPa: Negotiating Difficult Pasts” project, we are aware of the importance of the quality and comfort of cooperation – especially in projects carried out by many organizations, involving local communities. Mutual trust, agreement as to the most important values that define the framework for cooperation, as well as good communication and inclusiveness are extremely important for us and our partners.Together with FestivALT and the Urban Memory Foundation, we have developed the principles of cooperation in the project, which are reflected in the Code of Conduct. We are convinced that the process is as important as the effects of actions and that the quality of cooperation translates into long-term relationships, without which it is difficult to imagine social change.

Child protection policy of the consortium of the NeDiPa project 2022-2024

Guided by the care of our youngest participants and recipients of the Nedipa project, we introduced the rules for working with children, which are contained in the document “Policy for the Protection of Children’s Rights”. We want all our employees and associates to be guided by the child’s best interests and best interests when carrying out their tasks, seeing children as partners in building a safe, friendly and mutually respectful space.

On Sunday, July 3, we took part in the “Esther’s Willow” event commemorating the former Jewish community of Chrzanów, organized by FestivALT as part of the project “NeDiPa: Negotiating Difficult Pasts”. It is an honor for us to be a partner of this event together with the Urban Memory Foundation. “Esther’s Willow” is an artistic project created by Marta and Katarzyna Sale from Chrzanów and Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman from Philadelphia, whose ancestors lived in Jarosław and Warsaw.

A Silent Procession passed through the streets of Chrzanów. Its participants set off from the vicinity of the railway station, then went along Henryka Avenue to the Market Square and from there to the former Esther Square (now unnamed), where, in the place where the Great Synagogue once stood, they planted a symbolic willow. The project refers to the memory of a place. Until 1973, on the former Estera Square in Chrzanów, there was the Great Synagogue, which was blown up. Over the years, a weeping willow spontaneously grew in its place, unexpectedly cut in 2018. Before the Nazi genocide, half of the inhabitants of Chrzanów were Jews. The history and memory of them are getting weaker in the city every year. Thus, a tree was planted on the synagogue site – the symbolic Esther’s Willow, and the nameless square was metaphorically re-named Esther Square.