News

The Director-General of UNESCO, Ms Irina Bokova, and the Chief Executive Officer of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), Mr Robert Singer, announced on 1 November 2017 that both organizations will work together to develop a new interactive website on the history of the Holocaust.  

The platform will help counter messages of Holocaust denial and distortion that are circulating on the Internet and social media. The website will provide essential historical information about the Holocaust and its legacy, and in particular, the way that it continues to influence the modern world.  It will include testimonies of survivors, and latest news updates on instances of Holocaust denial, and other Holocaust-era related issues. At the heart of the website will be the “Educate A Friend” feature, which will enable users to ‘nominate’ a friend to receive automatic emails containing information and facts.

Witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust are passing on and younger generations are grappling with the legacy of this difficult history and its meaning for today.  New challenges for educators arise with the proliferation on social media of false information and hate-speech, including antisemitism and Holocaust denial.  Likewise, these events still deeply trouble societies across Europe, where the genocide of the Jewish people took place, but also in other areas of the world where this history resonates. The website will therefore also serve as a support tool for a large communication campaign on social media, which will reach out to young people and provide them with accurate, basic facts about how the Holocaust happened and importantly, how group-targeted violence can erupt in modern societies. Initially, the website will be available in English, French, and Spanish. The site will be available in other UN languages at a later stage.

The World Jewish Congress is an Official Partner of UNESCO, with associate status since 2012.

URL:

https://en.unesco.org/news/unesco-and-world-jewish-congress-cooperate-holocaust-education-website