Marsela Eschenasi, Serbia

Marsela Eschenasi Milutinovic is a teacher at the Agricultural and Chemical Secondary School in Kraljevo, Serbia. She attended a pedagogical seminar for Serbian educators at the International School for Holocaust Studies of Yad Vashem in 2010, where she deepened her knowledge of the Shoah and studied the pedagogical philosophy of Yad Vashem. Ever since she returned home, Milutinovic has taken care to teach this difficult subject using Yad Vashem's age-appropriate approach.
In the years since participating in the seminar, Milutinovic has created several educational workshops about the Holocaust. They have been published in a catalog of intercultural teaching units. In 2014, she won the first prize in the Creative School competition, sponsored by the Serbian Ministry of Education. Entitled "Learning about the Holocaust through Research and Film," the project was the fruit of Milutinovic's work with her students, combing primary sources for information about the Jews of Kragujevac and interviewing local Holocaust survivors. The class summarized their findings in a fifteen-minute film on the history of the Jews of Kragujevac and made it available to the general public on YouTube. Milutinovic's work is especially noteworthy due to its context. While the state curriculum in Serbia has long addressed the history of the Second World War and Tito's Communist partisans, only recently have the Serbian educational authorities begun to set aside time to teach specifically about the Holocaust and the fate of the Jewish population in the former Yugoslavia. Milutinovic's film exemplifies the educational philosophy of Yad Vashem. Made together with her students, the film presents the Holocaust in the wider context of the history of Jewish life in the region. Rather than the horrific images which used to be more commonplace in Holocaust education in Serbia, the film relies on photographs of living Jewish men, women, and children with their families—as the victims saw themselves, and how they might reasonably prefer to be remembered.