Centropa Summer Academy Budapest-Belgrade

The Summer Academy was supported by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a long-time partner of Centropa, as well as the German Foreign Office, the Claims Conference, the Hungarian Education Ministry, several US Embassies and various other donors from Europe and the United States.

The CENTROPA Summer Academy (CSA) is an annual gathering of up to 85 teachers and educational multipliers from 15 countries. The goals of the CSA is  to turn the great cities of Central and Eastern Europe into 3-D classrooms for participants, so that they discover Jewish heritage of these countries on site, and develop transational project ideas with their colleagues which can be used in classrooms around the globe.

CENTROPA has accumulated a unique digital archive of 1,200 testimonies and more than 20,000 old family photographs of Jewish Holocaust survivors in 16 European countries. These documents are publicly accessible on www.centropa.org, thus serving as an important contribution to documenting individual stories of members of the Jewish community surviving the Holocaust and living through the turmoil of post-war European history. The testimonies and photos also serve as the basis for various education materials in English, German and other languages; most importantly, Centropa has produced some 50 biographical multimedia short films which are being used in classrooms worldwide. During the CSA, teachers from Europe, Israel and North America discuss how these films can be used to initiate cross-cultural projects that transcend borders.

This year’s Summer Academy explored the Jewish heritage of Hungary and Serbia, when 85 participants from 16 countries traveled together for eight days and visited local historical and Jewish sites - such as the Jakab and Komor Square Synagogue in Subotica, Serbia and the former Nazi concentration camp of Staro Sajmiste in Belgrade; they participated in workshops and panel discussions with NGO activists from Serbia and Bosnia; and they attended lectures by Hungarian and Serbian historians and politicians such as Milan Ristovic and Zarko Korac. The Summer Academy program proved very useful for developing new didactic methods to ensure that the topic of Holocaust Education, in the larger context of Jewish History of Civil Society, will be taught in innovative ways in classrooms in Europe, and across the world.