ABOUT US
The European Janusz Korczak Academy is a Jewish foundation from 2009, open to the wider society. Its goal is to strengthen the Jewish community by imparting knowledge, to open it up and to reduce fear of contact in every direction. The Academy has earned a reputation as an experienced and competent partner for young and old in educational work, with a special focus on Jewish cultural education and interreligious or intercultural dialogue. Our intercultural and interreligious orientation in particular opens up our offerings to a broad audience and thus ensures lively participation even beyond the Jewish target groups.
The Academy has three educational centers, so-called Janusz Korczak Houses, in Munich, Berlin and Duisburg.
Our self-conception is based on the educational ideal of contributing to the self-responsibility and self-determination of the individual as well as to a deeper social and political-historical understanding and to the elimination of prejudices. In particular, we stand in the classical Jewish educational and teaching tradition, which is characterized by an intensive dialogue between teachers and learners with the encouragement of critical inquiry, as well as a close textual connection.
The Academy’s program emphasizes both formal and informal education. The Academy offers seminars and pilot projects with both scholarly and humanitarian appeal. Guests are invited to share their expertise and provide material for discussion. Exchanges take place throughout Europe.
- The central areas of our activity include:
- Jewish life in Germany – historical perspective(s) up to the present day.
- Historical-political education: focus on Holocaust remembrance work
- Democratic education: prevention and fight against anti-Semitism, exclusion and xenophobia
- Israel in the context of German-Israeli relations
- Media education and media competence
- Janusz-Korczak pedagogy of children’s rights
- Support for educational and social initiatives to promote the Jewish community
- Work with refugee youth and young adults in the areas of intercultural and democratic education.
To accomplish these tasks, we work with three “tools”: Education, counseling and broad social networking.
We are an educational institution that takes up the trail of Janusz Korczak’s dream. We want to continue to ask questions, to set out in search of answers that set the individual, the family, society in motion, to enable participation in the sense of Janusz Korczak and to set the direction: Tikkun Olam, “repairing the world” through education. In this way, we hope to contribute to a climate of openness, respect and tolerance. Especially in times of resurgent anti-Semitism and public vilification of Jews, but also in the context of the immigration and integration debate currently dominating public discourse with particular urgency, we consider this to be one of our most important tasks.
