Twenty-two Arab participants joined the International March of the Living in Poland Tuesday as part of a first-of-its-kind year-long program that promotes tolerance through Holocaust education.
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Organized by Sharaka, a non-governmental initiative that grows the impact of the Abraham Accords by transforming the vision of people-to-people peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors into a reality, the delegation consisted of influencers, journalists, academics, and NGO activists from Morocco, Bahrain, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Algeria.
Together with Israeli Arabs, they walked the 3-kilometer (mile) march from the Auschwitz concentration camp to the Birkenau extermination camp on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Sharaka's Holocaust education initiative in the Arab world was inspired by the historic delegation that the non-profit brought to March of the Living last year, which marked the first time that a pan-Arab delegation publicly partook in such a solidarity march.
"Sharaka's effort to bring an Arab delegation to March of the Living for the second time, within the context of our yearlong tolerance program, is firmly rooted in our belief that the best way to prevent hatred and atrocities is by learning from the past," Amit Deri, founder of Sharaka, said. "The Holocaust must be viewed as the ultimate warning against where intolerance can lead if left unchecked."
Mohammed Hatimi, a history professor at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University in Fez, and a member of the delegation, said, "An Arab proverb says that seeing what happens on the spot is better than listening to what is said about what happened there. For this reason, nothing beats a visit to a place of memory that is universal in scope. To be present at Auschwitz and to participate in the march is an intense event that reinforces the conviction that I must do my best to teach about the Holocaust and to learn from it. We all need such a pilgrimage for our own education, but also to pay tribute to the millions of victims of human horror, horror caused by radicalism taken to the extreme."
Over the course of the Sharaka Tolerance Program, participants engage in a series of in-person and online lectures and conversations about the Holocaust (including on the efforts of Muslims who saved Jews), antisemitism and all forms of extremism, genocide in modern history, sources of moderation within Islam, and what they can do in their societies to promote tolerance.
Prior to attending the March of the Living, delegation members visited Israel in February for a seminar at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. They also discovered diverse parts of Israeli society, visited religious and historic sites, learned about tech and innovation, discussed geopolitics, and explored arts and culture.
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