Every year, Dartmouth Hillel takes a group of students from different ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds to Belarus to restore the cemetery of a once vibrant Jewish community.  Since the Holocaust, these communities  have contained very few, if any, Jews.  The project team aims to preserve the past for the future.  Through the exploration of Holocaust sites in Poland and Belarus in addition to various interactions with these foreign cultures, the project is further enhanced.

Mission Statement

     The mission of Dartmouth Hillel’s Cross Cultural project to Poland and Belarus is three-fold:

• To explore the question of man’s inhumanity to man in the framework of genocide
• Visiting historical and emotional sites:  Auschwitz, Warsaw Ghetto, Grodno Ghetto, and the Great Grodno Synagogue)

• To respond meaningfully to the existential reality of its consequence
• Rebuild and restore an abandoned Jewish cemetery in Indura, a small village in Belarus           

• To immerse ourselves in the culture of those who lived through the Holocaust and its aftermath                                                                                                     
• Meet and interact with host families and community members in the villages worked in and local Grodno State University students