The ´Thursday Club´ [Klub Czwartkowy] was officially opened on Monday, 8 October 2007. The meetings are a new initiative of the Young Journalists Association POLIS, a member organisation of the HR House in Warsaw, and are partially linked with the journalist workshops organized by this association. The club members’ meetings are held every week and Halina Bortnowska is their animator.(26-OCT-07)

Written by Agnieszka Chmielecka/ HRH Warsaw
Logo from POLIS Association webpage: www.polis.youthpress.org

The club’s first meeting was devoted to the Day against the Death Penalty (10.X). Discussions concerned the history of abandoning the death penalty, as well as the arguments of its supporters, which were contrasted with the views of lawyers who question this punishment or reject it in its entirety. ´The Execution of Wanda Jean´, a film included in the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights film collection, was also presented. Following the meeting, Halina Bortnowska wrote: ´The film was able to transpose the issue of the death penalty from the domain of abstract deliberations into the sphere of life, sharing experiences with another person. I believe that this documentary also made us realize what a mysterious creature man is and how dangerous judgments can be.´

The guests of two consecutive meetings were: Israeli writer Alona Frankel and Polish writer, author inter alia of a book about the manslaughter in Srebrenica ´Like Eating a Stone´ (´Jakbys kamien jadla´), Wojciech Tochman. The meeting with Alona Frankel, particularly important for the Viridarium Group supporters, was associated with the Polish publication of her book ´A Girl´, for which she received the highest Israeli literary honors in 2005: The Sapir Prize for Literature and the Buchman Prize awarded by Yad Vashem. ´A Girl´ is a book that tells a story about childhood in the Lvov ghetto, and afterwards in hiding in the countryside and in Lvov, and about wandering in exile, which finally ended with emigration to Israel. The meeting with Wojciech Tochman was ranked among the so called ´journalistic line´. The author talked about his experiences as a reporter and about the things that constitute the reporter’s work. In turn, the meeting that took place before the parliamentary elections in Poland (21.X) was devoted to political marketing.

All the meetings fall under the subject matter of journalism and human rights and allow their participants to develop not only their own journalistic skills, but also to improve their knowledge on human rights.