RIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) — A group of Brazilian public school teachers will travel to Israel to learn about the Holocaust.
Some 15 non-Jewish teachers from Brazilian public schools will join educators from Jewish schools and B’nai B’rith next month for a course at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
For the first time, the course will be taught entirely in Portuguese and will look at the history of the Holocaust, intolerance, human rights and respect for minorities.
On Dec. 6, participants gathered at the Jewish Cultural Center in Sao Paulo for an immersion session with Holocaust survivors, organizers of the March of the Living and a Yad Vashem director. The course in Israel is set to begin Jan. 7.
According to a 2001 public opinion poll conducted by the local opinion-research organization IBOPE and the American Jewish Committee, some 89 percent of Brazilians are unfamiliar with the Holocaust, including 12 percent who gave wrong answers and another 77 percent who answered "I don’t know."
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