The sixth-grade students of the School and Kindergarten Complex named after St. John Paul II in Raków visited the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Warsaw congregation of the Evangelical Reformed Church, accompanied by their guardians: historian Grzegorz Szewczyk, Rev. Paweł Surowiec, and Beata Rejnowicz.
As part of an educational trip organized by the Heschel Center at the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), the students and their guardians took part in a journey through centuries of the history of the ethnically and religiously diverse Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, leading up to contemporary Catholic–Jewish and Catholic–Protestant relations.
The Torah and the synagogue
The students saw what a Jewish synagogue looks like, a Torah scroll, the customs of Judaism, and learned about the history of Jews who fought alongside Poles for a shared homeland. They also learned about the differences between various branches of Judaism in the past and today.
Along the path of the ghetto
In order to better understand the tragedy of the pogroms carried out by the Nazis against Poles and Jews during the Second World War, the youth from Raków not only viewed the entire interactive exhibition at the POLIN Museum, but also took part in an educational walk along the route of the former Warsaw Ghetto.
Care for truth
The educational walk along the path of martyrdom allowed the students from Raków to imagine the boundaries of the Warsaw Ghetto. Photographs from the 1940s depicting the everyday hardships of life in the ghetto made them aware of how important it is to care for historical truth, to respect human dignity, and to strive for freedom in its broadest sense.
The Raków thread
The youth from Raków also had the opportunity to see what their hometown—and many others—looked like in the 16th and 17th centuries, when not only the famous multi-denominational Raków Academy was active, but also the local synagogue (today the building serves as the town’s fire station). Evangelical traditions date back to the founding of Raków by Jan Sienieński, who was a follower of Calvinism, while his wife adhered to Unitarianism (known in Poland as Arianism).
The Evangelical Reformed Church
The students from Raków had the chance to see, visit, and even tangibly experience the history of the Evangelical Reformed Church thanks to a comprehensive introduction to the tradition of Calvinist Protestantism given by Krzysztof Bandoła-Skierski, a librarian of the Warsaw Synod.
The neo-Gothic interior of the Evangelical Reformed church in Warsaw allowed the young participants to notice similarities and differences between Catholicism and the Calvinist denomination in architecture, the manner of celebrating the liturgy, and, consequently, in the practical forms of living out the Christian faith.
Good cooperation
The trip of the youth from Raków was made possible thanks to the Abraham J. Heschel Center for Catholic–Jewish Relations at the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), which operates with the support of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Very good cooperation between Magdalena Stachal, Monika Stojowska, and Rev. Paweł Surowiec resulted in an opportunity to broaden the young people’s knowledge of topics important from historical, religious, and social perspectives.
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Rev. Paweł Surowiec