By Domenica V. Vera If there were any place I would choose to live in for the rest of my life, I would honestly and proudly answer “Krasnogruda.” During our 4-day stay, I did more self-reflecting than I have done in 19 years. Being in “The Manor” was life changing. I got in touch with […]
By Katherine Vargas Coming into this program, I knew little to nothing about this region’s history. And even now, I still have only captured but a sliver of it. But this sliver is a crack on the sidewalk that has been stepped over by the people themselves. The common trend is the need for a […]
By Renata Husted Type in the phrase “Vilnius Nightlife” into Google and you’ll get approximately 230,000 results. Type in “Vilnius Jewish Sights” and the results will be almost 200,000 less. After about four days of living in Lithuania’s capital, this difference in representation of Jewish history seems about right. The preservation and acknowledgment of the […]
By Erin Martha Kenney During our travels in Lithuania and Poland, we visited various museums dedicated to the remembrance of countless historical events, including the Jewish life which once thrived in these areas. It was at these museums that I began to realize the existence of incongruities within the national narratives of both countries. I […]
By Arielle Pressman When I first told my mother I wanted to do a study abroad program in Poland, she questioned my safety as a Jewish student being there. My grandfather was a Polish Jew who left the country during the war. After being bullied by Poles as a child for his religion, he later […]
By Farrell Brenner As a patrilineal Jew and a student of women’s and gender studies, I’ve been reeling with questions over the past two weeks. I felt deep in my body the collision between a struggle with authenticity and a burden of responsibility. In many of the places we visited in Vilno, Lithuania (a city […]
By Marcin Zak In a perfect world, it would be difficult to say something that hasn’t already been said about the likes of Warsaw and its suffering over the course of the Second World War. Having now been there myself and experienced its history a little bit, I’d say that time has not necessarily done […]
By Michael Kosowski To recall the first time that I, to use a colloquialism, stepped up on my soapbox, is rather hard to do. There is no one event, no specific time that marks my morphing into an individual who constantly expressed his beliefs and voiced his concerns. To put it bluntly, speaking my mind […]
By Megan Gorenflo Berlin is a large and well-known city in Germany, the country’s capital, and a home to many memorials and commemoratins in regards to the Holocaust. These sites are incredibly impactful and they cause people to draw very different interpretations based on their personal knowledge and experiences. On a recent weekend trip to […]
By Meagan Edwards In the heart of Berlin there lies a monument. The enormity of this monument catches the eye of whoever walks or drives by regardless if they are in Berlin to see it or not. Approaching the monument one will enter a maze of rectangle-shaped stone structures (or steleae). Seemingly identical to one […]