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HANNAH Project – Final International Conference in Athens, Greece

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Myrto-Helena Pertsinidi and Stefan Kiehne from Jugend- & Kulturprojekt e.V., are very glad to have coordinated the last partner meeting of Hannah: Challenging & Debunking Antisemitic Myths on the 9th of November at the Ionic Center in Athens organised by the Jewish Museum of Greece and delighted and moved at the same time to be joining the International Conference of the Εβραϊκό Μουσείο Ελλάδος – Jewish Museum of Greece which was held at the Ionic Center on the 10th and the 11th of November 2022. On the first day of the conference, representatives from the European Commission, the Ministry of Education of Greece, the German Embassy in Greece, the Polish Embassy in Greece, and the US Embassy in Greece, International Human Rights Association – IHRA, the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish Community of Athens, gave salutation speeches. The Director of the Jewish Museum of Greece, Mrs Zanet Battinou, welcomed everyone and moderated the conference. Later, historians of the Jewish Museum of Greece spoke about the Greek Jewry in history; a short history note about the Greek Jewry by Dr. Anastasia Loudarou, the persecution of Greek Jewry during WWII by Dr. Maria Vassilikou, the aspects of antisemitism in Greece by Dr. Alexandra Patrikiou and the extermination rescue and resistance in a familial history by Dr. Odette Varon-Vassard.

 

The 2nd day of the international conference, which was held on the 11th of November 2022 at the Ionic Center, was dedicated to the HANNAH project.

 

Ms. Myrto-Helena Pertsinidi from Jugend- & Kulturprojekt e.V., started her speech with an overall presentation of the project, its aims and objectives while she also presented a few words about the documentary series of the project that are available here https://hannah-project.eu/documentary/

 

Ms. Katja Grosse-Sommer from Centropa focused on the training seminars that each educational partner organised, and that can be found in the following section of the website https://hannah-project.eu/training-seminars/

 

Mr. Miško Stanišić from Terraforming.org presented the Digital Repository Of Antisemitic Narratives and highlighted its usefulness as an educational tool. The Repository can be found here https://hannah-project.eu/digital-repository/

 

Ms. Nevena Bajalica from Terraforming.org, explained how the idea behind the Educational Graphic novel was born and how the manual that the HANNAH consortium prepared can be used by teachers and educators. The Graphic Novel can be found at the following link https://hannah-project.eu/graphic-novel/

 

Dr. Eleni Kouki from the Εβραϊκό Μουσείο Ελλάδος – Jewish Museum of Greece, analysed the concept of the Oral History Interviews with second-generation Shoah survivors and shared her experience as the interviewer of them. 11 excerpts of the audio-visual interviews can be found on this section of the website https://hannah-project.eu/oral-testimonies/ while quotes from all 30 interviews that were taken can be found here https://hannah-project.eu/quotes/

 

Ms. Anna Wencel from the Galicia Jewish Museum, presented the HANNAH online course and described both its content and the idea concept of self-based learning that the course is built on. You can register to the MOOC for free in the following link https://vle.hannah-project.eu/register?next=%2F

 

Ms. Vassiliki Chatzipetrou offered an overview of the HANNAH website and the HANNAH Virtual Learning Environment that hosts the online course, while she also highlighted the importance of digital tools and strategies for teaching and raising awareness about the Holocaust and mentioned some examples. The link to the VLE is available here https://vle.hannah-project.eu/

 

Last but not least, Mr. Fabian Rühle from Centropa announced the winning projects of the Youth Competition and explained the project-based learning methodology behind the HANNAH competition.

The conference was closed by the screening of the video “Grandes Maisons” produced by the Music School of Xanthi, Greece that won the 1st prize. We have had the chance to speak with the school teachers in Athens that highly appreciated the results of the HANNAH project and the conference itself. For us, this is the success of the project and we feel truly rewarded. We would like to thank the Jewish Museum of Greece for the excellent organisation of our meeting and the conference, the very warm welcome and the organisation of very inspiring guided tours in the Jewish Museum of Greece, the Beth Shalom Synagogue, the Holocaust Memorial, the Acropolis Museum and the city tour in Athens.