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Bridges to the past

In spite of the "unbearable lightness" of our daily individual existence, our world today seems to be by far less threatening (at least, in Europe) than it used to be about 75 years ago, and actually started to be quite interesting. In the last twenty years - thanks to electronics revolution - the communication bridges were built across the globe. They created an unbelievable web of connections in space - of continents, nations and individuals. That leads me to agree with your idea that we need to go further and to build such bridges also in time. Naturally, we can't move forward in time, but at least, we can go back, to our past. I was always interested in the past of my family. Unfortunately, the continuity from their time count to mine, was cut off. That happened even before I was born - on one single day of August 28th, 1941, when my family, together with all Jewish community of Kedainiai, was annihilated and thus for me - rephrasing Shakespeare - "the time got out of joint". I grew up being cut off from my family roots, from their time line - without grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins, without having a chance to know them, to hear their stories.

I often dreamed to reconstruct their life, to see what they were thinking about, dreaming about, worrying about... And that's exactly what we can do now – to go step-by-step back in time, to read recorded memories of the eyewitnesses, to pick up every available piece of information and to try to solve the puzzle… At the same time, I'm interested not only in the life of my family and of the Jewish community of Kedainiai, but also in the life of their Lithuanian neighbors – what was their way of life, what was their mental and emotional world. Without that the whole picture of the past would be incomplete. Even a bit misleading.

Being a physicist, I wonder - maybe this is a vague analogue to a special theory of relativity by A. Einstein, one of the greatest scientists of all times, who understood that space and time are not separate identities, but that they are related and influence each other in the way which is quite incomprehensible to the ordinary human mind.

By saying this I mean, that building bridges to our mutual past, trying to proceed back in time and to analyze our history, might eventually influence the space dimensions between all of us, might reduce the physical distances between people. Understanding each other, our way of thinking, our way of feeling, the motives of our actions might create a new world of peace, mutual cooperation and understanding.

A.L.Shcherbakov

Tel Aviv, Israel

June, 2016

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I am Marsha Goren a retired English teacher from Israel. For many years I implemented a project called Globaldreamers. Your teacher was an active participant. I am especially proud of the Holocaust project in my Mom's memory. She loved children and believed in a better world. We can all be sure the Internet and educators can help in changing biased opinions and make our world a better place.

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by GlobalDreamers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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One of life's great joys is imagining yourself into other people's lives, other people's minds.  Crossing a bridge -- whether an actual wooden bridge or a bridge of understanding --  can change your life and the lives around you.

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This is a picture of my grandmother. When she was just 17 years old, she came to the United States all alone from Germany. That was a little over 140 years ago.  When she got here, found a job, learned English, married and raised seven children.  She was a little over 60 during WWII. She felt very bad about what her former homeland had done and spent all the rest of her life finding opportunities for her children and grandchildren to learn tolerance and acceptance of all people - teaching us to treasure the differences as they enrich our lives and make us better people.

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I feel that connecting with our past is essential as we are very quickly forgetting all our old traditions, family history, etc.  The youth of today do not place much value in their heritage.  An old photo means very little to them.  Creating this project allows us to remind the youth of why our family's history is so important and how connected we are to others around the world