Yad Vashem Hosts UN Seminar on the Holocaust

A seminar is being held this week in Jerusalem to give United Nations information officers the tools to understand the history of the Holocaust and its relevance for today.

The United Nations Department of Public Information, through its Holocaust Outreach

The seminar is dedicated to examining the circumstances that led to the Holocaust.

Program, has partnered with Israel's Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, to provide the seminar. The courses, under the heading of an "International Forum on Holocaust Awareness and Genocide Prevention," began on October 27 and will run through November 1. Lectures and related learning experiences are taking place at Yad Vashem's International School for Holocaust Studies.

The seminar is dedicated to examining the circumstances that led to the Holocaust, as well as the individual and collective responsibility in the prevention of genocide. The UN officers taking part in the six-day forum include representatives from Ankara, Baku, Bangkok, Bucharest, Kiev, Manila, Minsk, Moscow, Pretoria, Tbilisi, Tokyo and Yerevan.

"I am very pleased to welcome the UN information officers to Yad Vashem for this seminar," said Avner Shalev, Chairman of Yad Vashem. "The Holocaust, while targeting Jews, has universal significance for the community of nations. It represents a time when the values that underpin our joint civilization collapsed, and forces us to contend with how such an event was possible."

Touching on the proliferation of misinformation about the Holocaust, Shalev said, "This seminar with the UN will help ensure that the information officers have the tools and knowledge to disseminate accurate information in a relevant and effective manner."

Commenting on the seminar on behalf of the UN, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information Kiyo Akasaka said, "The United Nations must never forget that it was founded as a reaction to the brutality of the Second World War, or that the horrors of the Holocaust helped to shape its mission. That response is enshrined in our Charter, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We are grateful to Yad Vashem for this opportunity to examine together the motives that led to the human tragedy of the Holocaust, and to understand how and why its lessons are so important today."

The UN's Holocaust Outreach Program was created in 2006, by a General Assembly resolution, in order to encourage the development by UN member states of educational curricula on the subject of the Holocaust, and to mobilize civil society for education and awareness. The same UN resolution, 60/7, declared January 27 as the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust and rejects any denial of the Holocaust as an historical event.