INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

“Berezhany in the Memory of Poles, Jews and Ukrainians”

The Tkuma (Renascence) All-Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies (Dnipropetrovsk) and the Ukrainian State Historical and Architectural Society in Berezhany announce the forthcoming International Conference “Berezhany in the Memory of Poles, Jews and Ukrainians”. The conference, which will take place in Berezhany on June 12, 2007, will be the first of its kind. It will be for the first time that the history and memory concerning a small town in Western Ukraine will be discussed by scholars and living witnesses. The Conference will commemorate the final liquidation of the Jewish community of Berezhany, which occurred on June 12, 1943.

Berezhany was a mixed Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian town until the Second World War. As a result of the War and the Holocaust its Jewish community ceased to exist and its Poles were repatriated to Poland. Today Berezhany is a Ukrainian town. The initiators of the Berezhany Conference would like to contribute to an honest revival of the real past and memory of what was once a multiethnic town with a rich and interesting culture.

The participants in the Conference will include local Ukrainian speakers as well as guest speakers from Ukraine, Israel and Poland, such as Dr. Myroslav Marynovych of the Lviv Catholic University, Prof. Shimon Redlich of Ben-Gurion University in Israel, Dr. Igor Shchupak, Director of Tkuma Center, and Dr. Aharon Weiss, Academic Advisor of Tkuma Center. The expected audience will be teachers and educators from Berezhany and the vicinity, as well as a general public.

We are convinced that the Berezhany conference will contribute both, to the revival and memory of the common past, to a humanistic education of the young, and to the building of bridges among Poles, Jews and Ukrainians in the future. We appreciate the support of the Ukrainian authorities for the forthcoming Conference.

The Conference will include the presentation of Prof. Redlich’s book:

Together and Separately in Berezhany: Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, 1919-1945. – Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2007.