Salzburg Global Fellows Mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day

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Jan 28, 2014
by Marie-Louise Ryback
Salzburg Global Fellows Mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Salzburg Global Fellow speaks at UNESCO Holocaust Remembrance Day Conference

Salzburg Global Fellow Tracey Peterson speaking at the 2012 symposium on Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention in SalzburgSalzburg Global Fellow Tracey Petersen, Director of Education at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre, spoke on January 27 at the UNESCO Holocaust Remembrance Day Conference, ‘The Impact of Holocaust Education: How to Assess Policies and Practices?’ held in Paris on the occasion of the annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day.Two-time Salzburg Global Fellow Karel Fracapane, Programme Specialist for Education for Peace and Human Rights at UNESCO was involved in organizing the event.The day, which marks the 69th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi death camps, also saw the release of a new UNESCO publication, Holocaust Education in a Global Context. The publication explores a variety of approaches to Holocaust education and remembrance by a number of major historians and educators from all over the world, including Salzburg Global Fellow Richard Freedman, Director of the South Africa Holocaust and Genocide Foundation.Eighty years after the first Jewish detainees were murdered in the Dachau Concentration Camp, near Munich, Germany, and 70 years since the Soviet liberation of the Nazi death camps in Poland, the world is still grappling with the question of how the Holocaust and subsequent genocides were able to happen. This summer, Salzburg Global will hold its fourth symposium as part of the Salzburg Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Initiative. Can the lessons from the Holocaust and other genocides serve as a framework to warn future generations of pending mass atrocities?  Can what we learn from these events help us understand how to take preventive measures in the future? These are some of the questions facing educators, scholars, museum curators, government officials, civil society leaders, educational policymakers and others dealing with the topic. Since the launch of the Salzburg Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention Initiative in 2009, Fellows have learned that a great deal of work on the subject has been undertaken in the European and North American context, but little is known about how these questions are dealt with in the rest of the world.  This summer’s symposium will consider how to bring the lessons of the Holocaust to future generations, especially in the world beyond Europe, North America and Israel; ways to teach and build awareness about the root causes of the Holocaust and other genocides, drawing on experiences from around the globe; and strategies to counteract Holocaust and genocide denial and distortion. The symposium, to be chaired by Dr. Klaus Mueller, European Representative of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is part of a multi-year initiative on Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention, undertaken in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Austrian Future Fund and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).


For more information and to register for this year’s symposium see: www.salzburgglobal.org/go/535  For more on UNESCO’s activities relating to Holocaust education see: http://www.unesco.org/new/holocaust-remembrance