A private museum in UAE has displayed a Torah scroll, which survived the Holocaust in Europe during World War II. The move follows UAE’s latest announcement which stated that the Holocaust will be taught in schools.
The scroll is displayed on a permanent loan to the Crossroads of Civilizations Museum at Dubai’s historic district, from the Memorial Scrolls Trust.
The trust looks after over 1,000 Czech scrolls saved from the Holocaust, which was later sent to London.
“The Sefer Torah number 537, which this certificate accompanies, is one of the 1564 Czech Memorial Scrolls which formed part of the Jewish treasures saved in Prague during the Nazi occupation of 1939-45. They came from the desolate communities of Bohemia and Moravia and were for some time under the control of the Czechoslovak Government. The Scrolls were housed in a derelict synagogue by curators of the Jewish Museum in Prague, acquired with the help of good friends and brought to Westminster Synagogue in 1964,” the Crossroads of Civilizations Museum told Arabian Business in an emailed statement.
The museum added: “A part of the collections remains in a memorial museum at the Synagogue as a permanent remembrance of the Jewish communities from which they came, telling the story of their journey.”
This Scroll comes from Svetla nad Sazavou and was written at the end of the 18th century.
“I lived in the Arab world when I was young, and the term Holocaust does not exist … So this is a huge step,” Edwin Shuker, an Iraqi-Jewish businessman and vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who facilitated the loan, told Reuters.
Holocaust curriculum
Following the signing of the Abraham Accords between the UAE and Israel which normalised relations between the two countries, UAE’s Education Ministry is reportedly developing new Holocaust curricula, which will be taught to children in both primary and secondary schools.
UAE aims to position itself as a regional peacemaker, and in 2021, the Gulf nation also set up the region’s first Holocaust memorial exhibition opened in Dubai.
Since then, seven Holocaust survivors have been brought to the country to speak on the horrors of the Nazi genocide, including UK-based Eve Kugler, 91, a German-born survivor who spoke earlier this month on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the November 9, 1938, pogrom in Germany, a report by The Times of Israel reported.
Meanwhile, the Tel Aviv- and London-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) has been “advising on educational standards, including assessing course content,” the report said.
The UAE’s curricula were already “head and shoulders” above those of other regional countries in that they show “no evidence of hate at all,” nor antisemitism, and “recognise Judaism’s historic place in the Arab World”, the report added citing a speech by IMPACT-se’s chief executive officer Marcus Sheff.
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