August 2004 |
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CONTENTS:
Constructing Dialogues: Strategies for Connecting Past and Present at Gulag Museum
Moving Forward: Developing New Governance & Membership Structures
Coalition Sites Participate in New Tactics Online Web Forum
New Tactics in Human Rights International Symposium, Ankara, Turkey
Reflections of Community: Grand Rapids, USA
Museums and Civic Engagement Conference, Chicago, USA
Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide
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Constructing Dialogues: Strategies for Connecting Past and Present at Gulag Museum
How can a Site of Conscience inspire schoolchildren play an active role in sustaining their democracy? The Gulag Museum at Perm-36 offers an innovative program that uses the dramatic remains of Perm-36, the only surviving Stalinist-era labor camp in Russia, to explore the history of repression and totalitarianism - and how to resist it today. The experience begins from the moment visitors set out on their journey: schoolchildren travel to the Museum by bus, where they listen to a story about the road itself, known as the "road of manacles" or "penal servitude road to Siberia". After the two-hour journey, students explore the isolation cells and barracks that formed the repressive system of the Gulag. Following a tour of the site, children reflect upon the incarcerated victims of political repression. Questions asked during the conversation include:
Imagine yourself here all alone with your thoughts for 5, 7, 10 years. How would you feel?
Why were prisoners labeled as dangerous enemies of the state? What types of crimes had they committed that merited isolation for so many years?
What kind of feelings would a person have while being incarcerated?
The group then learns about the life stories of those who were repressed during the years of totalitarianism, and discuss he larger questions their stories raise, such as:
How could a daughter of a repressed clergyman be persecuted by her neighbours and classmates?
Why did neighbours and relatives sometimes turn against or betray one another?
How does someone change from being an average citizen to a persecutor?
Why was the mentality and morality of so many people distorted under the totalitarian regime?
Do any guarantees exist today to ensure that history will not repeat itself?
Starting this winter, the Gulag Museum will take its programming a step further with new teaching materials for secondary schools in the Perm region. In collaboration with Gulag experts, researchers, and university professors, the Gulag Museum will release the first of 4 albums dedicated to teaching about resistance to non-freedom in the USSR from 1945-1991. Questions posed throughout the book encourage children to reflect and discuss political repression and the meaning of democracy with their teachers and peers. For more information on Gulag Museum at Perm-36, visit http://www.sitesofconscience.org/eng/gulag_programs.htm
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Moving Forward: Developing New Governance & Membership Structures
(July 13-18, 2004)
Over the course of four days in July, the Coalition's Interim Steering Committee Members representing the District Six Museum, Gulag Museum, Liberation War Museum, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Maison des Esclaves, National Park Service Northeast Region, Terezín Memorial, and The Workhouse came together at Terezín Memorial to discuss and approve the Coalition's governance structure, membership services and future activities. The meeting marked the first time Coalition Members were able to meet at a Site of Conscience, which provided an evocative venue for learning, exchange and dialogue on how places of memory function as a valuable conduit for exploring contemporary human rights issues. Members experienced a powerful tour of former Nazi internment camps and the Jewish ghetto of Terezín and participated in education programs on the Holocaust and related issues developed by the Terezín Memorial Education Department. Finally, Member sites each presented the specific challenges they face to developing and growing as sites of conscience, and collectively devised possible solutions.
Watch for the next issue of Matters of Conscience for details on a full report of the meeting, including the Constitution and new membership application criteria and forms, which provide wider accessibility to anyone who is interested in getting involved and supporting the work of the Coalition. We extend our heartfelt appreciation to Jan Munk and the entire staff at Terezín Memorial for their gracious hospitality and diligent organization, which contributed greatly to the overall success of the meeting.
Consulting on New Freedom Center
Philip Kunhardt, a representative from the proposed Freedom Center at the World Trade Centre site in New York City, came to consult with Coalition Members on how to ensure an international and multipartisan interpretation for the development of a new museum dedicated to struggles for freedom. Kunhardt and Coalition members also explored possible ways in which Sites of Conscience could collaborate in future Freedom Center exhibits and activities.
Sites In the Spotlight: Documentary in the Making
Parts of the meeting at Terezín Memorial were filmed by Richard Lombard from Inscape Productions Inc., a film company interested in producing a documentary on the Coalition and the making of sites of conscience.
Critical Challenges in Developing Conscience: Using the History of the Holocaust to Raise Contemporary Issues at Terezín Memorial
What made it possible for racist violence and genocide to occur during the Holocaust, and what would make it possible that it could happen again today? What makes people become perpetrators? Victims? Bystanders? Resistors? How can I be useful in preventing these horrible events? These are the questions the Education Department of Terezín Memorial hopes its visitors will consider when visiting their site - knowing that this thinking is the best way to prevent the spread of racial violence and genocide. At a meeting at Terezín Memorial, the Education Department gathered with Sites of Conscience from around the world to discuss strategies for inspiring visitors of all ages to think critically about their world, and their role as citizens in shaping it. The group explored a range of strategies, many of which are being used effectively at Terezín today, including:
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Tell stories of the personal experiences and decisions that individual people in all positions made - guards, prisoners, guards' families, citizen bystanders - and discuss why. Help the visitors imagine themselves in the shoes of these individuals, and imagine what they would have done. How do personalities change, and decision-making change, in times of terror?
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Help students to reconstruct the lives of victims before they arrived at Terezín, giving students a greater understanding and empathy for the people victims were before their internment, and what was lost when they died;
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Raise the question, "How does an average person become a perpetrator?" Show visitors photos of anonymous, ordinary individuals and ask them to guess who is the perpetrator and who is the victim. Trace the personal histories of the perpetrators, the steps they took to committing acts of violence, and provoke discussion of how stereotypes of what "bad people" look like are formed.
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Feature oral histories of Holocaust survivors, as well as guards, other camp workers, and bystanders, throughout the site. Conduct as many interviews as possible now, while these people are still alive;
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Develop exhibits, plaques, and/or ask the tour guides to discuss where the social and political issues raised at the site are still being debated around the world today (e.g. Rwandan genocide in 1994, or the role of the Red Cross).
Sites of Conscience Exchange Visit: From Asia to Africa
Mofidul Hoque, publisher, cultural activist, author and a Trustee of the Liberation War Museum, will be visiting the District Six Museum to speak on the Liberation War Museum's human rights program for school children.
At the center of the program is a mobile van with a built-in mini museum which visits different schools in remote areas. School children are invited to view short film on liberation struggle, two separate posters explaining Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Concept of Peace and Tolerance, and are encouraged to get eye-witness account of local reality during the days of struggle, so that they themselves can become the chronicler of history and make local history alive.
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Coalition Sites Participate in New Tactics Online Web Forum
(August 13 - September 13, 2004)
Do you have a question for a Site of Conscience? Have an idea? Need some advice? Want to connect with other people doing human rights work? Coalition Members have been invited by New Tactics in Human Rights, a project under the Center for Victims of Torture, to be featured as an innovative "tactic" in the defense of human rights. Coalition Members will participate in New Tactics' Web Forum, an electronic bulletin board which allows organizations and groups involved in human rights work to publicize and share their strategies over the Internet. With human rights practitioners from more than 90 countries visiting the New Tactics web site, including the people featured in a database containing over 120 different tactics, Coalition Members will be circulating information on their Sites on tools and approaches in using historic sites to open new conversations on contemporary human rights issues. Join the ongoing discussion and help shape the forum by clicking on
http://database.newtactics.org/Forums/viewtopic.php?t=12
New Tactics in Human Rights International Symposium, Ankara, Turkey
(September 29 - October 2, 2004)
Human rights practitioners from 85 countries within a wide range of fields and experiences will interact, share tactics and find new ways to collaborate at the New Tactics in Human Rights International Symposium in Ankara this fall. The Coalition office, together with the Liberation War Museum and the District Six Museum, will lead a session on how sites of conscience can help build lasting cultures of human rights. Human rights practitioners from around the globe are invited to participate. Learn how to develop and apply networks, strategies and practical tactics in your work. For more information (available in English, Spanish, French and Turkish), visit http://www.newtactics.org/Symposium/Announce_en.html
Reflections of Community: Grand Rapids, USA
(October 20-22, 2004)
Join the Association of Midwest Museums and Michigan Museums Association Joint Annual Conference for a wide variety of presentations and sessions by specialists on how museums can serve as vital resources in their communities. Liz Sevcenko, Secretary General of the International Coalition and Vice President of Interpretation at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, will be delivering this year's opening keynote speech on making museums centers for civic dialogue. Early-bird registration deadline is August 31, 2004; registration forms and additional information can be found at http://www.midwestmuseums.org
Museums and Civic Engagement Conference, Chicago, USA
(November 18-19, 2004)
The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, in conjunction with the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, is organizing an international conference to explore how museums, historic sites, and historical societies can serve as our new town halls, centers for dialogue on pressing social issues. The conference will feature presentations from historic sites around the world, including a keynote address by Memoria Abierta, on successful strategies for promoting dialogue on difficult topics, as well as interactive workshops. To view the conference program, visit http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/2004conference/Programtentativeweb.pdf. All registration forms must be postmarked before October 30, 2004, and can be downloaded from http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/2004conference/registrationwebsite.pdf.
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Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide
Can sites of conscience be living memorials? Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide (GARIWO) promotes the creation of parks, woods and gardens all over the world, commemorating the deeds of the Righteous (one who has demonstrated the ability to act according to their own conscience, to react in the face of evil, and to assume personal responsibility) and the value of good for the history of mankind.
Registered in 2000 in Milan, GARIWO was inspired by the memorial Yad Vashem, which honors non-Jews who rescued others from the atrocities of the Holocaust. Each tree planted in the first Garden of the Righteous, founded in Jerusalem, Israel, bears a plaque with a name of a Righteous person, a theme repeated throughout all GARIWO sites. The Sarajevan Garden celebrates acts of brotherhood between distinct ethnic and religious groups during the conflict which raged in the former Yugoslavia, while a third Garden, located in Yerevan, Armenia, remembers selfless acts performed during the genocide of 1915-1923, in which half a million Armenians perished. A fourth Garden was planted in Milan last year to commemorate Moshe Bejski, Svetlana Broz and Pietro Kuciukian, founders of the GARIWO.
The Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide Committee addresses human rights issues through lectures, public debates, conferences and publications. In 2003, during a conference on "the value of moral resistance to Soviet totalitarianism" in Milan, Italy, participants discussed the significance of free speech and people's struggle against censorship. To learn more about how this verdant network reminds us of the "option to say yes or no" even in times of oppression and terror, visit http://gariwo.net/eng_new/index.php.
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We welcome your feedback! To submit comments or suggestions, receive a text-only version, or update your e-mail address, please contact coalition@tenement.org
Matters of Conscience is supported in part by the Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation.
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