“TOLI: It changes you. It makes you want to get involved in the life of the community you live in. It encourages you to find out less known things, to love and look at history with different eyes.” – Livia Ghiurcuta, 5-year TOLI Impact Grant recipient. Livia teaches at the Aurel Lazar High School in Oradea, Romania. During her five years of coordinating TOLI-funded projects, Livia involved her students in complex activities while attracting other schools in her municipality and local cultural institutions to take part.
Livia’s various projects included “A Child’s Dream,” which focused on Oradea’s local Jewish legacy. Her students visited the city’s Jewish Museum and the Eva Heyman Memorial, which memorializes a 13-year old Holocaust victim from Oradea. The students read books on the Holocaust, heard recorded testimonies from survivors, participated in a roundtable event, organized an exhibition of drawings and symbols dedicated to freedom and peace, wrote letters to officials, and created graphic novels based on the books they had read. The project concluded with students presenting their work to the local community at a public event commemorating Romania’s National Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“The TOLI Impact Grant Program is very important in my professional activity,” Livia expressed. “However, it’s not the money/grants that are most important, but the support received, the recommendations, and the openness that TOLI has towards education, culture, history, and the future of our students.”
Livia Ghiurcuta: 5-Year Impact Grant Recipient