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The Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau was founded in 1996 by social activist and Zen teacher, Roshi Bernie Glassman. Roshi Glassman had visited Auschwitz previously and experienced a vision of thousands of souls trapped there in need of healing, remembrance and release. He vowed to return to Auschwitz to do this healing work. In November 1996, Bernie Glassman and the Peacemaker Community brought an international, multi-faith group of more that 150 peacemakers to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland for the first Bearing Witness Retreat (see documentary video below). The participants included survivors of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, children of survivors, and children of Nazi guards who worked in the camps. Many of the participants had lost family members, some their entire families, at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps. The participants were from many countries including Poland and Germany, Canada, England, France, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, and the United States. Among the participants were Buddhists, Christians, Jews and Muslims as well as people with a secular orientation. In later years a Native American elder from the Lakota Ogalala Nation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota attended the retreat. Since 1996, hundreds of participants in the annual Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland have discovered profound personal healing and transformation in service of creating a more just and peaceful world. The Peacemaker Community Poland (Polska Wspolnota Pokoju) is the local host and organizer for the retreat. The Peacemaker Institute based in Boulder, Colorado USA is now the international host and organizer of the retreat.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat takes place the first full week of November each year. However, in 2008 we are instead conducting a special training retreat with past retreat staff and a small group of international peacemakers for the purpose of re-visioning the retreat to include both bearing witness and reconciliation activities. We invite all those who have previously served as retreat staff to join us this year in Oswiecim for this training retreat. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat will be open to the public again in November 2009. For future retreats we will be inviting people from all the various sides of a chosen regional conflict in the world to come to the Auschwitz-Birkenau retreat and doing reconciliation work.
2009 Retreat Dates: November 1–7. Further details, retreats fees, logistics and so on will be available on this site in the coming months.
Following is a list of related links:
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