REMEMBR-HOUSE: Remembrance, Research, Education. An innovative approach to civic education and teaching about the Shoah.
The Fondazione 1563 per l’Arte e la Cultura della Compagnia di San Paolo and the Museo Nazionale dell’Ebraismo italiano e della Shoah-MEIS present the REMEMBR-HOUSE project, funded by the European Union within the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Value (CERV) program. The project, which is focused on preserving Shoah memory, is planned to run for two years, 2023–2024, and is intended for teachers, educators, cultural practitioners, students and a global audience.
With a strong emphasis on historical research and information literacy, REMEMBR-HOUSE develops civic education courses for teachers, educators, and students, offering engaging, digital and innovative approaches and tools. The project involves workshops with students, training for teachers and professionals, dissemination activities, multimedia content andthe production of bilingual teaching kits and manuals.
The centre of the project is the house, in its simultaneous dimension of physical and emotional space. Family, refuge, security, sharing, and constraint are just some of the many meanings the concept evokes. With a digital humanities approach, the Historical Archive of the Compagnia di San Paolo becomes the starting point for exploring the history of the 20th century: the papers of the EGELI Fund make it possible to retrieve detailed lists of the confiscations of Jewish assets in Piedmont and Liguria after the Italian fascist government approved the racial laws in 1938 and the following years.
The house is thus transformed into an extraordinary means of approaching the history of the Holocaust: reviving the memory of lost rooms and objects establishes a link with the past and with individual stories that become symbols for reflecting on the present and fundamental human rights.