By educating visitors on the culture, history, and ongoing presence of Jewish communities, the Holocaust museum of Porto aims to combat modern antisemitism and prepare the youth who will guide the destinies of Portuguese society, which today seems very sick and without direction.
The overarching narrative emphasizes the dynamism of the Jewish people. It highlights how survivors rebuilt their lives after the war, maintained their traditions, and established dynamic modern communities.
European educational programs often comfort non-Jewish societies by focusing heavily on past repentance for dead victims, rather than requiring respect for, or engagement with, the works, texts, values, and realities of living Jews.
Standard Holocaust education fails. It isolates the tragedy from broader Jewish history, reduces Jewish identity to passive victimization, and normalizes modern prejudice. Classrooms frequently treat Jews only as historical or symbolic victims rather than as a thriving, evolving civilization.
The Holocaust is often taught merely to promote general empathy or as a morality play about how bigotry is bad. By failing to teach centuries of anti-Semitism or who Jews are, the lessons leave students without an understanding of why the atrocities occurred in the first place, or leave them with harmful, ahistorical misconceptions.
Students often visit a Holocaust museum and then ask if Jews still exist today. Dara Horn calls this a “null curriculum”. She pushes back on the pedagogical trope that Jews are taught about as "just like everyone else." She argues this erases a rich 3,000-year history of distinct countercultural Jewish traditions and inadvertently suggests it is acceptable to hate a group if they deviate from the majority.
Holocaust museums focus heavily on the stories of living Jews to reclaim the humanity of victims targeted for total extermination, honor the resilience of those who survived, and preserve the vitality of Jewish culture that the national socialists attempted to erase.
The Nazi regime stripped millions of their names, identities, and rights. Once young visitors to the Holocaust museum have learned this lesson, other questions usually emerge. "How many times has the same happened over the centuries? And in modernity?" The accusation "Jews don't count" is heard today, given that political media and judicial systems tend to diminish them among the increasingly large group of sexual and racial minorities.
