Guest Lecturer Jakub Bronec

In his guest lecture, Jakub Bronec focuses on past Jewish life in Luxembourg. The Grand Duchy had a small Jewish community in the early 1930s which grew exponentially in the late 1930s and during the first years of the Second World War. Many Jews from Central and Eastern Europe who were afraid of National Socialist persecution found their way to Luxembourg. Most of them left again before mass deportations to concentration camps began in the country. As a result, the historical traces they left in Luxembourg are few and far between. In the extensive collection of oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors, however, Jewish life in Luxembourg is often mentioned. Jakub Bronec developed a virtual platform, called an IWalk, for Luxembourg’s second largest urban area, Esch-sur-Alzette. An IWalk is an interactive educational application that connects specific physical locations with memories of historical events that took place at those locations. People walking through the different tours use tablets to watch clips of Holocaust survivors and witnesses telling personal stories about the role of the locations in their experiences. The clips are drawn from their testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. There are more than a hundred testimonies of survivors telling their stories from the pre-war and post-war years in Luxembourg. Their narrations are a valuable record of the experiences, emotions and feelings of the Luxembourgish Jewish population within the country’s wider collective post-war memory. With the IWalk platform, Bronec has re-introduced past Jewish life into the contemporary urban environment. In this lecture, Bronec presents virtual platforms and discusses their educational potential for teaching modern Jewish history. Students will learn how to use archival sources in the digital era, including how to edit video recordings.