Human Rights - What Do They Have to Do with Me?

During the war in former Yugoslavia, the Jewish community of Sarajevo became a center where Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Jews and others worked together to survive and to help one another. Using Centropa videos (El Otro Camino: 1492 and Survival in Sarajevo), I teach my students about the story of the Jews of Sarajevo and of their charitable organisation La Benevolencia. Using this as a historical background, I start a discussion about minorities and majorities and about human rights, and how those rights protect and benefit all of us, no matter where we are and no matter whether we (Jews and others) are in the minority or the majority. I point out the 'Jewish connection' to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (after WWII and the Holocaust, with Rene Cassin, the French-Jewish lawyer, being one of the authors), and give my students an introduction to what those rights are. For this, I use material provided by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which I think is beautifully ironic when you look at the history of the 20th (and the first quarter of the 21st) century. Then, individually or in small groups, students choose one or two human rights plus one organization or individual that 'fights/fought' for that/those right(s), and they present the right(s) and organization/individual of their choice. 

In the past years, students wrote papers about, for example, the Israeli youth movement Krembo Wings, in which children and teens with special needs work, play and learn together with 'regular' youngsters, and the Jerusalem branch of YMCA.