JERUSALEM – On November 9, 1938, Eve Kluger was only seven years old. During what became known as Kristallnacht, the “night of the knives”, she was awakened by a group of Nazis who, together with a police officer from her hometown of Halle, Germany, broke in and devastated their apartment, destroyed the house. window of his father’s shop and burned down the synagogue his grandfather had helped build. Eve, who miraculously survived the Holocaust with her family, offered her testimony to an unprecedented audience: a group of young Muslim and Jewish students in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, eighty-four years later.
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The first testimony of the Shoah in an Arab country
“This is the first time that a Holocaust survivor like me has been able to speak to an audience of Jewish and Muslim boys together in an Arab country,” Eve stressed, before sharing her story.
Holocaust education in Arab countries has always been a complex issue. For decades the issue was considered by the Arab squares to be distant because it was Western and European, little or nothing taught in schools, or even viewed with hostility or distorted because it was considered linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2010 for example, a survey conducted in six Arab countries – Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates – by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy found that only 3% of the participants expressed solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust, against the 56% who said they didn’t try any.
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In recent years, however, something has begun to move. In 2018, for example, Morocco included the Holocaust in its curricular program. The real turning point, however, came with the Abrahamic Agreements in 2020. Since then, the leading countries, the Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco itself, have begun to change their approach.
In 2021, the Crossroads of Civilizations Museum, a private museum in Dubai, inaugurated what was described as the first exhibition dedicated to the Holocaust in an Arab country. The same center where Kluger bore his testimony yesterday, also denouncing the injustices that continue to be perpetrated in the world and the resurgence of anti-Semitism.
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“As a Muslim, I cannot stand by and allow the memory of the victims and the voices of the survivors to fade into history,” commented Sheikh Ahmed Obaid Almansoori, the founder of the museum. During the event, the Emirate branch of the March of the Living foundation was also inaugurated, which deals with Holocaust memory and education.
“For the first time, I feel that we can really begin to know the past of the Other, and as we look to the past of the other, we can consider their happy moments, but also sad ones,” said Eitan Neishlos, ambassador of the other. organization in the Gulf. “Today, of course, we are confronted with a tragic piece of our history,” he concluded. “But my hope is that we do it to build a better future.”