Yad Vashem plans educational center in Germany: NRW in focus!

Yad Vashem plans educational center in Germany: NRW in focus!

The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem has big plans for Germany: an educational center to commemorate the Shoah is to be built. The institution recently announced this and the decision on the exact location will be made quickly. In the first half of December, delegations want to visit various locations in North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria and Saxony in order to advance the project. Jewish General reports that Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan emphasizes that the education center must become a nationwide institution.

Another important step in this direction was the meeting with a delegation from the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament, which recently made a solidarity visit to Israel. The head of the State Chancellery of North Rhine-Westphalia, Nathanael Liminski (CDU), also traveled to Israel, where Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst signed an agreement with Dayan on further cooperation between North Rhine-Westphalia and Yad Vashem. This illustrates the country's commitment to remembrance work and the fight against anti-Semitism.

Establishment of the education center

The anti-Semitism commissioner Sylvia Löhrmann (Greens) emphasized the need for the education center to include the population and represent all of Germany. NRW has the advantage of an existing network of memorial sites and Jewish schools. Abraham Lehrer, Vice President of the Central Council of Jews, added that the central location and high population of North Rhine-Westphalia could be crucial for the establishment of the institution. It would be the first Yad Vashem facility outside of Israel.

The idea for the memorial in Germany has existed for four years and is supported by the federal government of both the Union and the SPD in the coalition agreement. The focus is on the confrontation with the National Socialist reign of crime and the singularity of the Shoah, in which around six million Jews were murdered between 1941 and 1945, which corresponds to around two thirds of the Jewish population in Europe, as Wikipedia describes.

Memory and commemoration

In this context, NRW State Parliament President André Kuper recently laid a wreath for the victims of National Socialism in the “Hall of Remembrance” and visited the museum of the memorial and research center and the memorial for the children killed by the Nazis. During his visit, he also signed the memorial book while the eternal light burns in the hall in memory of the Holocaust victims.

Kuper also met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Thursday evening to reaffirm NRW's solidarity in the conflict with Hamas. Kuper was accompanied by numerous personalities, including Sylvia Löhrmann, Abraham Lehrer and Barbara Dauner-Lieb, all of whom work to promote remembrance and ongoing education about the Holocaust.

One of the central challenges in the near future will be to deepen understanding of the horrors of the Holocaust and to sensitize a new generation to these topics through the planned center in Germany. It is clear that there is considerable social interest in learning and reflecting more about the events of the Second World War and the beginnings of the Holocaust in order to prevent such crimes from happening again in the future.