As the founder and director of the ACHAVA Festival, my many years of collaboration with Éva Fahidi have always inspired and moved me deeply. Éva's great love for people and the intensive joint work with young people has meant that I have significantly expanded the ACHAVA Festival's education programme in recent years.
We work with around 5,000 schoolchildren a year on the topics of coming to terms with the Holocaust and democracy education throughout Thuringia.
Éva Fahidi was closely involved in the establishment of the Sendehalle Weimar Foundation and the purchase of the former Nietzsche Memorial Hall until her death, and she played an active role in this endeavour as a member of the Board of Trustees.
As founder and Chairman of the Board of the Sendehalle Weimar Foundation, I would like to shape this historically significant location into an educational and historical campus in the spirit of Éva Fahidi. Éva's motto ‘hate must end’ will characterise this place. I will do everything in my power to ensure that we build a good place for all generations in Weimar and thus at the site of Buchenwald in the spirit of Éva Fahidi.
Éva Fahidi will always be present and guide me in my work and endeavours. At a school in Povinz, Thuringia, Éva said at the end of a joint ACHAVA event to the more than 200 pupils present: "Just be good people! I try to live and work in this spirit.
Martin Kranz, who lives in Weimar, organized the first ACHAVA Festival in 2004.
The central theme of ACHAVA – "The Festival of Dialogue" – is interfaith and intercultural dialogue in the spirit of respect for others and the fight against hatred and exclusion.
Dialogue with young people is becoming increasingly important in the ACHAVA program every year. As part of the "STUDENT FORUM," Martin Kranz invites around 300 students to a project day at the Thuringian state parliament every year. On this day, the students discuss, among other things, negative phenomena in school communities, exclusion, physical and mental violence, which they themselves condemn and would like to see eliminated.
The two important questions, "Why?" and "How?", are answered by ACHAVA's invited guests, historical figures, educators, and journalists, together with the students.
The preparation process makes the dialogue on the topic practically continuous in the schools participating in the program.