Welcome to our website
Zofia Zamenhof Foundation aims at propagating the idea of freedom, the rules of democracy, cultural diversity and tolerance. Throughout our work, we want to show how to solve social problems. We want to contribute to increase the level of education of various social groups in countries where we are going to run our work and to have an influence on the integration processes between nations. We are certain that this is education which gives a chance to grow and makes the social differences smaller. Intercultural dialogue is possible thanks to education. Thus, our work aims also at education and training, also in the aspect of international cooperation. We also want to propagate the knowledge about the people connected with the ideas of our foundation. Below there are short biographies of our patrons.
Zofia Zamenhof –
a Polish pediatrician and a specialist in internal medicine of a Jewish background, a daughter of Ludwik Zamenhof (the creator of Esperanto). During the second World War she was displaced to the Warsaw Ghetto where she continued her work as a doctor, in August 1942 deported to Umschlagplatz. Having been a doctor, she had a chance not to get on the train but she didn’t want to leave her little patients so she went with them to Treblinka extermination camp where she died in a gas chamber.
Juliusz Bursche – a protestant pastor, a doctor of divinity, a bishop of the Evangelical-Augsburg Church in the Second Polish Republic. After the outbreak of the First World War in April 1915 he was exiled to Orenburg (Russia). After two years he came back to Warsaw and became the Head of the Evangelical-Augsburg Church. When Poland regained its independence he went to Cieszyn Silesia to take over protestant churches under the supervision of Warsaw consistory and to erect Silesia diocese of the Evangelical-Augsburg Church. As a Polish expert on Cieszyn Silesia and former East Prussia territory in 1919 Bursche took part in Paris Peace Conference where he presented a memorial of Polish protestant pastors concerning Polish annexation of Cieszyn Silesia and Upper Silesia. Between 1919 and 1920 he was the chairman of the Masurian Plebiscite Committee. In March, 1920 he became the Head of the Evangelical-Augsburg Church in reborn Poland. In 1928 he became the chairman of the Council of Evangelical Churches in the Second Polish Republic. In 1930 by the University of Warsaw he was granted the title of Doctor Honoris Causa. He was killed by Gestapo soldiers in 1942.
Emil Piotr Barchański
Born in 1965 in Warsaw, died in 1982 – a sixteen-year-old student of Mikołaj Rej Secondary School in Warsaw, a democratic activist in the People’s Republic of Poland during the regime of Wojciech Jaruzelski. On 3rd March, 1982 Barchański was detained by the Security Service in an underground press while printing some anticommunist publications. He was killed by the Security Service, his body was found in Vistula River. Barchański is considered to be the youngest victim of martial law in Poland. In Warsaw on Bonifraterska 12 Street there is a church and on its fronton Barchański’s commemorative plaque can be found. On 3rd May, 2008 Barchański was posthumously awarded the Polonia Restituta Commander’s Cross by the President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński.