On June 25 in Warsaw, Cultural Affairs Officer Dan Hastings helped kick off the second edition of The Olga Lengyel Institute (TOLI) seminar that provides training to educators around the world on Holocaust education and human rights. Based in New York, the TOLI institute was established to educate students in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world about human rights and social justice through the lens of the Holocaust and other genocides so that such atrocities may never be repeated. To accomplish its mission, TOLI provides professional development seminars for educators in the United States and abroad that link the lessons of the Holocaust and other genocides to current world events, thereby working with teachers to promote a human rights and social justice agenda in their classrooms. To date, TOLI has supported over 2,000 educators in the United States and Europe who, in turn, have taken the lessons of the Holocaust to their classrooms where they are applied to understand and act against social injustice, bigotry and hatred. The Institute is named after Olga Lengyel, a survivor of Auschwitz and the author of Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz. An American immigrant and philanthropist, Olga Lengyel dedicated herself to remembering the martyrs and lessons of the Holocaust so that such atrocities would never happen again. A group of 32 Polish teachers are currently participating in the June 25-29 seminar that is taking place in Warsaw and Krakow. At the opening, TOLI’s president Mark Berez gave welcoming remarks, as did the Israeli Ambassador to Poland Ms. Anna Azari and Łucja Koch, the head of the education department at Warsaw’s POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and a Holocaust survivor who shared how her life had been saved by a Polish family. During his remarks, Cultural Affairs Officer Dan Hastings commended the educators for their interest in the topic, and told them that the U.S. diplomatic mission in Poland actively supports initiatives that promote remembrance, education, and dialogue on the Holocaust.
