Today, Friday, May 3rd, more than 800 Portuguese children participated in an early Yom HaShoah ceremony and respectfully kept silent in a room bearing the names of tens of thousands of Jews murdered during the Holocaust.
"In this museum, we press the importance of having the children and teenagers asking how it was possible for this unspeakable tragedy to take place," said Gabriel Senderowicz, the President of the Oporto Jewish Community.
The Holocaust Museum of Oporto is run and supervised by members of the Jewish Community of Oporto whose parents, grandparents and relatives were victims of the Holocaust and is part of a strategy to combat antisemitism that already includes the Jewish Museum of Oporto, school visits to the Oporto Synagogue, courses for teachers, and history films.
The Museum was created in 2021 by the Community in partnership with B’nai B’rith International and with the assistance of Holocaust museums around the world. It focuses on the general public, especially youths and schoolchildren, and invests in education, professional training for educators, promoting exhibitions and supporting research. Over 150,000 students have already visited in the last three years, making it one of the most frequented Holocaust museums in the world. Portugal has no more than one million teenagers in total.
