HHREC Announces 2025 Educators’ Study Tour of Germany and Poland

This past summer, HHREC hosted educators from the U.S. on a sixteen-day tour of historical sites in Germany and Poland, as teachers from Archbishop Stepinac HS, Roosevelt HS (Yonkers), New Rochelle HS, White Plains HS, Mount Vernon HS, Denzel Washington HS, and the School for the Visual & Performing Arts (Mount Vernon) were joined by others from Florida, Ohio, New Jersey and South Carolina. The trip included stops at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the Jewish Museum of Berlin, the Wannsee House, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the former Warsaw Ghetto, and Sachsenhausen, a former concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany.

“This summer I joined a trip with the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center to learn about how many people in Germany and Poland are bravely facing their history, how they honor the memory of those killed, how they explain what went wrong, and what if anything has changed.” said Reverend O’Hanlon. “A group of high school history teachers and myself were led beyond the movies and books many of us have seen and read. This trip, for me, was a kind of pilgrimage to learn more about how our faith informs our view of human sinfulness and efforts to build a more just society. The memory of that philosophy professor’s warning has remained strong for decades: the problem is not limited to one group or a purportedly more primitive time.”