The UB and the Shoah Memorial sign an agreement to promote education on the Holocaust

The vice-rector for Equality and Social Action of the UB, Maite Vilalta, and the director of The Shoah Memorial, Jacques Fredj.
The vice-rector for Equality and Social Action of the UB, Maite Vilalta, and the director of The Shoah Memorial, Jacques Fredj.
Institutional
(30/10/2019)

The European Observatory on Memories (EUROM) -the multidisciplinary and transnational network on public memory policies launched by Solidaritat Foundation of the University of Barcelona -and The Shoah Memorial from Paris, have formalized a collaboration agreement to promote education and multidisciplinary research on the Holocaust, genocides and massive atrocities, to fight current social conflicts. The agreement consolidates a cooperation that started two years ago with the training of instructors and education professionals in Catalonia and Portugal, to cope with racism, xenophobia and antisemitism at schools.

The vice-rector for Equality and Social Action of the UB, Maite Vilalta, and the director of The Shoah Memorial, Jacques Fredj.
The vice-rector for Equality and Social Action of the UB, Maite Vilalta, and the director of The Shoah Memorial, Jacques Fredj.
Institutional
30/10/2019

The European Observatory on Memories (EUROM) -the multidisciplinary and transnational network on public memory policies launched by Solidaritat Foundation of the University of Barcelona -and The Shoah Memorial from Paris, have formalized a collaboration agreement to promote education and multidisciplinary research on the Holocaust, genocides and massive atrocities, to fight current social conflicts. The agreement consolidates a cooperation that started two years ago with the training of instructors and education professionals in Catalonia and Portugal, to cope with racism, xenophobia and antisemitism at schools.

The agreement was signed yesterday, Tuesday, October 29, by the vice-rector for Equality and Social Action of the University of Barcelona, Maite Vilalta, and the director of The Shoah Memorial, the historian Jacques Fredj. Afterwards, Jacques Fredj gave the conference “Antisemitism, new response to a never-ending challenge”, in the room Ramón y Cajal at the Historical Building of the UB.

Created in 2012 with the support from the European Commission, the European Observatory on Memories (EUROM) opts for the recognition of memory diversity. In this sense, and through the promotion of multidisciplinary, cross-sectional and transnational projects, EUROM aims to identify and analyse the diversity of memorial processes in both in Europe and in other continents; promote debate to create public representative policies and contribute to analyse and manage them; promote socialization of memorialist initiatives and real connections between institutions, professionals and researchers. At the moment, the network includes 50 institutions and research groups from Europe and America.

The Shoah Memorial is an active institution on research, documentation, editorial publication, teaching, training and cultural mediation. Its origins are in a clandestine file created in 1943 by the Russian-born industrialist and member of resistance Isaac Schneersohn to gather evidence on the hunting down of the Jews. Once released in France, the archival center became the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation and was a fundamental piece to support French statements in the Nuremberg processes, and later, in the trials to the responsibles and accomplices of the final solution in Germany, France and Israel.

The headquarters of the current Shoah Memorial in Paris was opened in 2005 in the same place where Schneersohn founded the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr in 1956. Classified as historical monument in 1991, this space features the Wall of Names, with more than 70,000 names from deported Jews from France, and it holds the main ceremonies related to the French state Shoah every year. This place also holds the archival of the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center (CDJC) and a library, a permanent exhibition on deportations, temporary exhibitions and cultural events. In 2012, the Shoah Memorial opened a museum in Drancy, in front of the former internment camp in Muette.