Waldsee Inspiration Circle: Tikkun Olam

In the heart of Waldsee, Concordia Language Villages’ German Village, a quiet gathering space invites visitors to remember the victims and survivors of the Holocaust and consider their responsibility to build a better world.

The Waldsee Inspiration Circle: Tikkun Olam, unveiled in a 2025 commemoration ceremony, was named with a Hebrew phrase meaning “repair of the world.” It's a call to action not to simply remember but to improve and fix the world with care to make it better.

The design features two semi-circular seat walls that reference an embrace, centered around an inlaid pomegranate, which is a symbol of love, hospitality, and blessing in Jewish culture. It is surrounded by the German words begegnen (encounter/engage), besinnen (reflect/contemplate), and bewegen (move/set things in motion).

The gathering space also includes five informational panels with a corresponding website telling the story of the Holocaust, honoring the experiences of the victims and survivors through stories, poems, and art, confronting prejudice and discrimination, and the history of the German Language Village, with its mission of inspiring courageous global citizens.

While the sun-dappled leaves of Minnesota’s North Woods are thousands of miles and decades away from the camp system where the Nazi regime committed mass murder, Waldsee, meaning “forest lake,” bears a connection to those crimes.

Seeking to hide their genocide from the world even as they implemented it, from 1942-1945 the Nazis forced their victims to write postcards to friends and family inviting them to come to their new home, using a name that evoked a beautiful natural landscape — Waldsee, or “forest lake.” In reality, the postcard writers were thrown into camps to be worked to death or murdered outright.

Concordia Language Villages was made aware of the issue in 2018. After research and nationwide collaboration with historians and experts, Concordia Language Villages chose to keep the Waldsee name while taking greater responsibility for remembrance and education. 

The Tikkun Olam circle stands as a reminder that language learning is inseparable from empathy, understanding, and the responsibility to care for one another.