Press Release
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Jan 28, 2024 12:00 EST
The entire day was accompanied by heavy security for the museum and the youth who visited the site, after the museum had been closed to the general public since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 due to concerns for the safety of visitors and the local Jewish community.
PORTO, Portugal, January 28, 2024 (Newswire.com)
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The Holocaust Museum in the northern city of Porto, Portugal, marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day last Friday by hosting some 2,000 middle- and high-school students from schools all over the country. The ceremony was brought forward by one day from the date set in 2005 by the UN General Assembly as the International Day of Remembrance for the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis between 1938 and 1945.
The entire day was accompanied by heavy security for the museum and the youth who visited the site, after the museum had been closed to the general public since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 due to concerns for the safety of visitors and the local Jewish community.
Museum staff prepared a program for the young visitors that included an introduction to the genocide perpetrated against the Jews of Europe during those years. Each school that participated in the day held its own memorial ceremony, which included lighting a memorial candle in the museum’s Names Room, a unique space documenting the names of tens of thousands of Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
In the three years since its establishment, the Porto Holocaust Museum, the only one on the Iberian Peninsula, has hosted some 150,000 youth. Visitors to the museum learn about what happened before, during and after the Holocaust, and a visit to the precisely planned and designed space leaves a strong impression on the visitors. Among the exhibits at the site are a reproduction of sleeping cells from the Auschwitz death camp, artifacts and documents that belonged to survivors who fled the Nazis to Porto.
“Every year, about 50,000 youth visit the museum from schools all over the country, a number that constitutes about 5% of all school children in the country. Here they communicate with us and we feel they understand and love us,” said Michael Rothwell, director of the Holocaust Museum whose grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz.
Source: The Jewish Community of Porto
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