In 2016, IC4LP received a number of invitations to visit several high schools in and around Kaunas to talk about its work. During these visits, it quickly became obvious that the vast majority of Lithuanian teenagers (not to mention a woefully large amount of their history teachers) know almost nothing about the life and culture of their grandparents’ former Jewish neighbours. And so, with financial support from the Good Will Foundation, in 2017 IC4LP launched Fifty Schools, an informal education project that, with the help of Mariana Sutkienė in Vilnius, visited dozens of high schools all over Lithuania to share its own experiences, to listen to what young Lithuanians had to say on the subject of Lithuanian Jewish history and to have open and honest discussions about the Holocaust in Lithuania.
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Two students peer through a broken window at the abandoned former synagogue in Čekiškė
Two students peer through a broken window at the abandoned former synagogue in Čekiškė
Mariana Sutkienė holds up a copy of The Last Bright Days during a visit to the Jewish cemetery in Kavarskas
Richard Schofield talks to a group of high school students in Naujoji Vilnia