This year, the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre (CTHGC) celebrates a quarter of a century of providing Holocaust education in South Africa, Cape {town} Etc reports.
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Twenty-five years ago, CTHGC founder Myra Osrin helped bring an Anne Frank exhibition to the country, which then toured for 18 months. The response from teachers and students was so strong that it sparked the idea for something more lasting.
‘I realised a Holocaust centre could be of great value to South Africans,’ Osrin said during the centre’s celebrations on 7 August.
Around this time, she became aware of two ‘non-Jewish brothers building the first Holocaust centre in the United Kingdom’. So she headed to London, where her journey took her to the Beth Shalom Holocaust Memorial Museum in Nottinghamshire, England.
There she found James and Stephen Smith, sons of a Methodist minister, and their mother, Marina. According to the Jewish Report, the family had visited Yad Vashem (Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust) in 1991 and were so enamoured by what they learned that they decided to build a centre that would serve as a memorial and educational facility.
Joining forces, Smith became a patron of the CTHGC and later the executive director of Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation (a non-profit aimed at creating audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust for educational purposes).
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Today, about 556 000 people have visited the CTHGC, including members of the public, pupils, teachers, civil servants, police, military personnel, businesspeople, activists and professionals.
‘In the book of Genesis, when G-d calls out to Abraham, he responds with a single word: ‘hineni’ [here am I],’ Smith said.
‘Twenty-five years ago, a vision took root in this place when Myra Osrin answered the call and said, ‘Hineni – here am I.’ With her answer to that call came a vision of remembrance, of education, a vision that has grown and flourished.’
‘We have witnessed an entire generation grow. The 15-year-olds who first walked through these doors are now 40.’
‘Now their own children come here. These children were born into freedom and democracy, and so it’s here that they understand more about the price of freedom, the vigilance it requires, and the responsibility it bestows upon them,’ he added.
‘The CTHGC asks us to explore what we learn from those who kill. What we learn from those who save. What we learn from those who forgive.’
‘The lessons of the Holocaust aren’t confined to one time, one place, or one group of people. They are universal lessons about the fragility of democracy, the dangers of hatred, [and] the responsibility we all share to stand up for human dignity and human rights.’
‘To be willing to say “Here am I” in a world in which anti-Jewish hate grows and sorrow and mistrust abound – are we willing to be the bridge, to walk into the breach, to shine a light, to be fully human?’
‘We’ll never complete this work, but neither shall we desist from carrying it out. As we celebrate this milestone, let’s say, once again, “Hineni – here I am.” Ready to remember, to teach, to learn, to hope, to act, to be the hands that reach out across divides.’
Ellen Germain, the United States special envoy for Holocaust issues, said the CTHGC’s ‘dual role of a memorial and an education centre is even more vital today’, adding that her office is witnessing ‘the largest rise of disinformation and misinformation’ the world has ever seen.
‘That’s why it’s so important that facts are protected in institutions like the CTHGC, which also teaches critical thinking. We need to help our youth become resilient to disinformation.’
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