Germany's main Jewish leader is giving a guarded welcome to a politician's suggestion that everyone living in Germany, including migrants, should be made to visit a former Nazi concentration camp at least once.
The suggestion by Sawsan Chebli, a Berlin city government official who is Muslim and of Palestinian descent, came amid concern over anti-Semitism among migrants from Muslim-majority countries. She told Sunday's Bild am Sonntag newspaper that concentration camp visits should become part of integration courses for migrants.
"It makes sense for everyone living in this country to be obliged to visit a concentration camp memorial site at least once in their lives," Chebli said Sunday when she first floated the proposal.
Currently, the German integration courses focus on learning the German language and studying the country's history, culture and its legal system.
Josef Schuster, the head of Germany's Central Council of Jews, told Deutschlandfunk radio Wednesday the idea is "good in principle" but there are questions over details. He said it wouldn't work simply to summon people to concentration camp visits.
Schuster said well-prepared visits would be "absolutely important" for older schoolchildren and for asylum-seekers.
"People who have fled to us who have themselves had to escape or been expelled, can develop empathy in such memorials," Schuster said.
Germany has received well over a million migrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.
Germany is home today to an estimated 200,000 Jews and has built a reputation in recent decades as a tolerant, safe place for Jews to live – though data shows anti-Semitic crimes reported to the police rose 4% to 681 in the first eight months of 2017 from the same period in 2016.
Last month, the government decried as shameful the spectacle of the Israeli flag being burned at demonstrations against U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
Asked about the possibility of mandatory visits to concentration camps, a spokeswoman for the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees said the integration course for immigrants already had a module regarding the consequences of Nazi rule for the people of Germany and Europe.
Last month, Germany's justice minister called for more emphasis on the Holocaust in migrants' integration courses.
Schuster said everyone who wanted to live permanently in Germany must identify with its history.
Such visits, which should be prepared by schools, would show where anti-Semitism and hatred for Jews could lead, he said.
