Engaged Memory Consortium
The Engaged Memory Consortium is set up and led by three Polish Jewish organizations: FestivALT from Krakow, the Urban Memory Foundation (UMF) from Wroclaw and Zapomniane Foundation from Warsaw.
The core of the partners’ interest is dealing with uncommemorated sites of the Holocaust and neglected Jewish heritage in Poland and East Central Europe. The partners form an expertise-based consortium that allows them to support each other with knowledge, know-how and best practice. The Zapomniane Foundation is specialized in locating, marking, mapping and commemorating dispersed burial sites of Holocaust victims located on the territory of Poland (www.zapomniane.org/en). FestivALT focuses on deploying artistic and activist strategies to make visible to the public uncommemorated and neglected sites of Jewish & Holocaust history (https://festivalt.com). UMF advocates for care and revitalisation of the heritage of the pre-war German Jewish communities of Silesia area and commemorating the Holocaust, through working with memory, shaping the urban landscape, researching history, genealogy, education and civic engagement (https://urbanmemoryfoundation.org).
The EMC has been cooperating since 2020 and has been implementing three major projects funded by the European Union: “NeDiPa – Negotiating Difficult Pasts” (2022-2024), “MultiMemo – Multidirectional Memory: Remembering for Social Justice” (2023-2024) and „ReActMem – Activism, Arts and Public Remembrance” (2024-2026) funded from the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Program and focus on establishing a pan-European framework for difficult heritage and organize a series of events fostering debate around Jewish heritage sites in Europe. In addition to that, the EMC has supplemented their work with Norway funds to establish further collaboration with partners in Scandinavia (“Places of Remembering and Forgetting” project 2020-2021 as well as Partnership Grant (2023-2024 for collaboration with the Falstad Center in Norway). Each of the organizations is a separate legal entity and has its own strategic plan, however they join their efforts to tackle systemic challenges.
Over the course of these projects, since 2020 the EMC has organized over 40 events and activities, fostering discussions around Jewish heritage sites through conferences, workshops, online seminars, artistic interventions, and debates. The participation of diverse stakeholders, including civil society actors, activists, artists, youth leaders, researchers, and local governments from multiple EU and non-EU countries.
Affiliated partners:
- CEJI – A Jewish contribution to an inclusive Europe (Belgium),
- Family Memory Trust (USA),
- Foundation Formy Wspólne (Poland),
- JCC Warsaw (Poland),
- Foundation for Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries (Poland),
- The Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg (Germany),
- The Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg (Germany),
- Brama Cukermana (Poland),
- Researchers on the Border affiliated with the Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland),
- LABA Berlin (Germany),
- Marom Budapest (Hungary),
- The Council of the Jewish Community of Estonia,
- The Jewish Czulent Association (Poland).
Supporting organizations: