Yonathan in Berlin - July 2025

 After my meeting with Kübra, I took the S-Bahn to the Berlin Grunwald station, where I visited what I consider one of the most important and intense Holocaust monuments in the city, the Mahnmal Gleis 17 (Platform 17 memorial). There are basically three words for memorial or monument in German: Denkmal, Gedenkstätte, and Mahnmal. 'Gedenken' means to commemorate, and 'mahnen' means to warn. Last year, during the Centropa Summer Academy, I led a short commemoration ceremony at the site. From here, Jews were transported to ghettos, concentration and - mostly - death camps between October 1941 and March 1945. At Gleis 17, you can see the dates of each transport, its number of victims, and its destination. As with quite a few places that played a part in the Holocaust and that have become memorial sites, the contrast between what we know happened there and the quiet and beautiful surroundings is horrifying.

My name is Yonathan Bar-On (Bert de Bruin). Born and raised in the Netherlands, I have lived in Israel since 1992. I am a historian and a columnist for the Dutch daily Friesch Dagblad, and I have been teaching English at the high school of the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa, Israel for the last 15 years. In my classes, besides the English high school curriculum, I usually have time to do extracurricular projects. I have developed class projects (often using material provided by Centropa ) on topics like human rights, refugees, Holocaust, migration, and resistance in Nazi-Germany. You can get an impression of those and other projects by clicking here . I've participated in Centropa seminars in Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Sarajevo, and Prague. With two different Ukrainian schools, in 2024 and 2025 I did a project titled 'Comfort Food in Times of War', in which our students shared experiences from the wars in their country and made videos about dishes that helped them cope ...

On this weblog, I'll be writing about my work and experiences during my stay in Berlin in July 2025. With the support of Netzwerk Israel (a cooperation of the EVZ Foundation (Remembrance, Responsbility, and Future ), the New Israel Fund Germany and other NGOs), I am staying in the German capital for over two weeks. Together with staff members of House of One , I'll be developing a project in which Jewish, Muslim and Christian students in Israel and Germany will learn together about certain values. In my free time, I will be upgrading an article that I wrote in cooperation with Centropa last year, which can be used as a guide to 50+ monuments and memorials in Berlin that deal with persecution by and resistance to the Nazi regime. I want to visit all the monuments and museums, take pictures, and see which ones I think are (the most) suitable and should be given the highest, medium and less priority for visits with students. This way I can work on two subjects, Jewish-Muslim-Ch...