SJM equips students to deal with antisemitism
Each year, 35,000 students visit the Sydney Jewish Museum to learn about the impact of the Holocaust by meeting survivors and taking part in a series of specialist workshops.
Sydney Jewish Museum
Today, these workshops have taken on added importance, because they equip students with the tools and understanding to allow them to stand up in their communities to combat discrimination, racism and antisemitism.
The Museum is heartened to see that schools right across Sydney are, in these troubling times, responding in record numbers to its specialist education programs.
The Sydney Jewish Museum’s Head of Education, Sandy Hollis, said: “Each and every visitor who passes through our doors leaves with an understanding of the unique dangers that antisemitism poses – that hatred of Jewish people is really the sign of the fraying of the fabric of our society.”
7 October was a watershed event for global Jewry; it was the worst mass murder of innocent Jewish people since the Holocaust. Since that time and almost incomprehensibly, Jewish people around the world have experienced a sharp increase in antisemitic incidents. This is a trend from which Jewish Australians, concerningly, have not been immune.
The rise of antisemitism in Australia has been particularly distressing to many Holocaust survivors, including those who every day speak to students at the Sydney Jewish Museum. In November, these same survivors issued a joint statement appearing in the Australian press, stating: “Never did we think that we would witness a re-enactment of the senseless and virulent hatred of Jews that we faced in Europe.”
The Jewish community has experienced unprecedented antisemitic behaviour in many forms and in many forums in the past months: in schools, on the sporting field, on university campuses and online on social media platforms.
Museum CEO Kevin Sumption believes a lack of exposure to Jewish culture, coupled with mis- and disinformation being spread about Jewish people in the wake of the Israel-Hamas conflict, has created fertile grounds for dangerous antisemitic myths to thrive in these multiple sites in Australia. What has followed from this is that the Sydney Jewish Museum has fundamentally shifted the way it will address learnings from the Holocaust and respond to the distressing levels of antisemitism.
Since October, the Museum has actively rolled out several new initiatives to combat the rise of antisemitism.
In the coming months, it will deliver new educational programs and resources to school students and corporate groups that explore issues of othering, prejudice, and the history of antisemitism. It is also working to develop a major behaviour-changing campaign targeting antisemitism amongst Generation Z on social media.
The Museum team would like to express thanks to its visitors, members and donors, who have shown immense support for its staff, volunteers and survivors, during these difficult times – it is very much appreciated.
