Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on September 13, 2020

Issued on: 13/09/2020 - 17:26Modified: 13/09/2020 - 17:31

The majority of French young people aged 15-24 have learned the history of the Holocaust at school, according to a poll published on Sunday. But the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) regrets that these lessons are not available in one in ten classrooms.

Some 87 percentof the young people questioned said they had already heard about the Holocaust, 95 percentof them had heard about the gas chambers and for 80 percentof them, they had learned about this at school, according to a pollconducted by Ifop for the UEJF and French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, published on Sunday.

Carried out from September 4 to 9, the survey was published to tie in with a ceremony in remembrance of the deportees and victims of the Shoah, commemorated on Sunday with a service at the Great Synagogue of Paris located in the rue de la Victoire, Paris.

"We can congratulate ourselves on the progress made in society thanks to schools educating young people about the Shoah. Some 68 percentof the young people surveyed said they knew about the Vel'd'Hiv Roundup, whereas in 2012 they were only a third," the UEJF said in a statement.

Vel dHiv was the name given to a mass arrest of more than 13,000 Jews in Paris by French police on July 16 and 17, 1942. Many of them were temporarily held in the Vlodrome d'Hiver (Vl d'Hiv) stadium. They were then sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. In 1995, then French President Jacques Chirac apologised for Frances complicity in this atrocity.

>> 75th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation: Testifying till their last breath

Commitment of schools

According to the UEJF, "these figures are proof that the schools commitment as well as of the many other parties involved, such as the survivors who testify or the associations at work, are bearing fruit".

Despite the encouraging results,one in ten students surveyed found it was impossible to learn about the Shoah in their class, while21 percentnoted the many criticisms and questions from other students during lessons about the subject.

"[We're] alarmed at these particularly high figures," the UEJF wrote. "They bear witness to latent anti-Semitism in some French classes. How can you be a Jewish pupil if anti-Semitism is so present that it is impossible to talk about the Shoah?"

The survey also revealedthe influence of Holocaust denial statements on online video platforms and social networks. Nearly one in three (29 percent) of the young people questioned said they had already read or viewed content questioning the existence of the Holocaust. Of these, 57 percenthave learned about these denial theories on Youtube and 40 percenton Facebook.

The UEJF wants social platforms to take more responsibility fortheir online content sayingthese figures "demonstrate once again that platformsmust urgently make a real commitment not to undo everything taught in schools by allowing the simple and rapid spread of antisemitic content".

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

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More French students are learning the history of the Holocaust, survey shows - FRANCE 24

Category: Holocaust Denial
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