History teachers’ Refugee Boulevard project wins national award

The work of History teachers Stacey Zembrzycki and Nancy Rebelo (along with Anna Sheftel, Saint-Paul University; and Eszter Andor, Montreal Holocaust Museum) has been honoured with a 2020 Public History Group Prize awarded by the Canadian Historical Association.

Their project Refugee Boulevard: Making Montreal Home after the Holocaust was created in close collaboration with Holocaust survivors who settled in Montreal in the post-World War II period.

The CHA states that the award “recognizes work that achieves high standards of original research, scholarship, and presentation; brings an innovative public history contribution to its audience; and serves as a model for future work, advancing the field of public history in Canada.”

The CHA announced the honour on their website:

“Driven by community outreach and oral histories, Refugee Boulevard: Making Montreal Home After the Holocaust is an audio tour of six child survivors who came to Montreal through the War Orphans Project in 1948. Developed by researchers at Dawson College, the Montreal Holocaust Museum, Saint Paul University, and survivors, the tour is rooted in strong scholarship, while linking the past to the present and future through community outreach and collaborative research methods.

“The tour is well crafted and can be followed easily in-person or using online mapping services, such as Google Streetview. As such, it is an effective demonstration of how digital resources and methodologies can expand and enrich more traditional forms of public history. Survivors’ personal anecdotes provide a depth to the content that is supported by a strong narrative framework and the supplementary booklet.”

Nancy says that it “is our hope that listening to survivors share their stories in the downloadable audio tour will open up conversations that help validate the roles immigrants play in our past and current communities. This is especially important as we work to build a just and inclusive society in Montreal and beyond. If you haven’t yet engaged with the project, please do so. It’s beautiful.”

The team is currently hard at work along with Research Assistant Jasmin Cardillo, a former Dawson student, creating a virtual option for taking the walk in these strange times.

You can get more information, listen to the audio tour, get a transcript and more at http://refugeeboulevard.ca/

Dawson’s Academic Matters featured the project in January 2020: https://www.dawsoncollege.qc.ca/academic-matters/issues/2020-01/