Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation

The IHJR seeks to dispel public myths about historic legacies
in societies divided by ethnic conflict

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Ambassadors of Remembrance

Mission

Ambassadors of Remembrance seeks to connect survivors of political violence with students in their former home countries in order to encourage the collaborative exploration and documentation of the survivors’ experiences before, during, and after the conflict that forced their escape or emigration.

The goal is to:

1. give students first-hand access to personal histories in order to help them develop empathy and social courage,
2. give survivors a sense of closure by building positive connections to people in their former country and by ensuring that their stories will be carried into the future, and
3. promote reconciliation by giving all participants the opportunity to reevaluate their preconceptions about the other and provide them with a framework where together they can develop a new understanding of their shared country’s past, present, and future.

A New Initiative – “Ambassadors of Remembrance”

In this project, survivors and refugees of political violence who today live scattered throughout the world will be brought into contact with high school and college students from their former home country. Together they will explore and document their experiences before, during, and after the conflict that caused their flight or internment and emigration.

Ambassadors of Remembrance is based on the premise that when students and survivors enter into personal relationships in order to actively participate in the areas of testimony, documentation, commemoration, and social action, their work leads to a type of reconciliation that cannot be achieved through conventionally existing means.

There are currently few opportunities for survivors and refugees of political violence to present their experiences personally to an audience of interested young people in their former home country. Ambassadors of Remembrance will make this possible for many people by providing a unique platform where survivors and students can confront their shared country’s past honestly and directly and together forge new pathways towards reconciliation.

The Structure

The staff of Ambassadors of Remembrance will set up a database of interested student and survivor participants. Through this database, the students and survivors can be connected to each other in meaningful ways; for example, by finding someone who lived in their former town, attended their school, or who has the same interests. A significant aspect of the correspondence will be the students’ documentation of the survivors’ biographies and life experiences. The website will give the students a public platform to present their work and the biographies of the survivors will be made available to the general public and preserved in an archive for the future. The phases of the project involving face-to-face encounters will be determined by the financial situation of the project and the willingness of other organizations, including official bodies in the host country, to support such meetings. Ideally, groups of students would travel from their country to meet survivors living in the USA, and a number of months later a group of survivors would travel to their former home country to meet with their student pen pals, speak at their schools, and participate in collaborative commemorative projects and a collaborative commemorative event.

Ambassadors of Remembrance will:

1. provide the structural framework in which a dialogue between students and survivors can occur
2. create environments, both virtual and physical, where critical discussions of the events of the past can take place including maintaining an interactive website, holding seminars, and orchestrating face-to-face meetings between the student and survivor participants
3. nurture the relationships between the students and the survivors so that the students can become the vehicles through which the survivors can give their testimony and have it documented for future generations and provide support for all participants during this process
4. oversee and provide resources for the documentation of the survivors’ life stories
5. encourage transgenerational dialogue by including the participants’ family members when possible
6. document and make available to the public the participants’ experiences with each other, focusing on the moral lessons that are taught and learned and the ways in which their relationships have contributed to reconciliation
7. engage in activities which will directly or indirectly help to combat intolerance and hatred in the students’ communities and provide participating students various opportunities to take social action
8. develop collaborative commemorative activities, including art projects and commemorative ceremonies
9. disseminate information and provide technical assistance to schools, community and religious organizations, governmental agencies, and the public in general regarding the history of the conflict that led to the forced or voluntary emigration/escape of the survivor participants
10. provide resources to the participating schools in order to ensure that the basic history of the conflict can be taught as accurately and objectively as possible before the students enter into correspondence with the survivors
11. actively engage official representatives from the respective countries to participate in the activities of Ambassadors of Remembrance as a way to publicly acknowledge and validate the difficult work being carried out by the participants and to help instill in them a sense of recognition and accomplishment
12. promote the project and the documentation produced by the participants in the media in order to disseminate the results to the largest audience possible
13. collaborate with scholars and experts in various fields to develop a methodology for this type of grass- roots reconciliation work and to evaluate its effects on the participants and its potential to be successfully implemented in other post-conflict regions

Outcomes and Evaluation

Since an integral component of the program will be the students’ documentation of the survivors’ biographies, the project will produce a wealth of sometimes previously undocumented material about the lives and experiences of the survivors. Even with the survivors’ biographies have been previously documented, the documentation that is produced through this project will be a unique form of documentation because of the special type of understanding that comes to exist between the survivors and the students. In addition to the biographies, all participants will evaluate their experiences with each other and with the project, and these works together with the collaborative art and commemorative projects will forever be a testament to the possibility of reconciliation through honest and open engagement with the past.

While the heart of Ambassadors of Remembrance is the encounters between survivors and interested teachers and students in their former home country, we are also very concerned about developing a methodology of this type of grassroots reconciliation work and seeing where it could serve as a model in other countries where historical memories are the cause of contemporary conflict and animosity. For this purpose we will be working with an interdisciplinary team of scholars to help document and evaluate the project.

Our Next Steps

The Ambassadors of Remembrance initiative is currently working on building networks of potential participants and partner organizations in Europe and the U.S. and seeking funding from a number of different sources in order to determine the first country in which it will be implemented. Poland, Ukraine, and Netherlands are countries where we already have networks of people interested in our work. The Netherlands is of particular interest as the IHJR headquarters are currently transitioning to The Hague. Our goal would be to add additional countries in 18 month phases, eventually developing a broad European-wide program where the participating students and survivors will have access to each other in transnational collaborative commemorative efforts and seminars.

Depending on the success of these programs, the methodology that is developed during the process, and the financial support found for the organization, we can foresee the implementation of the program in a number of regions in the future where historical memories are a cause of contemporary conflict and animosity.

Background

In 2003, a small group of young people in Austria began an ambitious program called “A Letter to the Stars” with the main objective of having high school students document and commemorate the lives of Austria’s known murdered Holocaust victims. Since that time the concept has grown to include intensive personal contact between Austrian students and Austrian Holocaust survivors living all over the world. The program has reached an unprecedented 50,000 Austrian students and encouraged many of them to document and commemorate not only the lives of Austria’s murdered Holocaust victims, but has also provided them the opportunity to enter into personal and intimate relationships with Austrian Holocaust survivors. Hundreds of students have worked to document the survivors’ life histories, thousands have had the opportunity to directly listen to survivors’ testimony and learn the moral lessons the survivors want to have carried into the future, and many more have participated in inspiring commemorative events and art projects and voiced their commitment to fight against all forms of racism and intolerance. Through this program, hundreds of survivors have personally been able to convey their experiences directly to students and have been able to build new and positive connections to their former home country. Survivors in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel have been visited by groups of Austrian students, and in May 2008, 200 Austrian survivors from all over the world traveled to Austria to meet their student pen pals, speak at their schools, and attend a special commemorative event together with students and teachers from every province in Austria. Although each participant’s experience with the project is personal and unique, the words of Dr. Dorit Whiteman, a psychologist and survivor participant, seem to summarize many of the others’ feelings:

“…I believe that encounters in the schools between the young students and the older generation forged a link which will have a profound impact on both sides. For every student who has learned something new about the Holocaust, there will be a great number of others who will be influenced by them. And for us, nothing could be more touching than the students’ interested, eager, empathetic faces…”

Sponsors

The IHJR will provide administrative support for the project but the funding for Ambassadors of Remembrance must be raised independently. If you are interested in knowing more about the project, or becoming involved in any way, please contact Kym Harris at:

360 W. 55th St. 4R
New York, NY 10019
(646) 508-3476