Fighting the rise in antisemitism through Holocaust education
Global News
With a rise in the number of Canadians experiencing antisemitism firsthand, programs like the mobile Tour for Humanity are teaching younger generations about the Holocaust.
On a grey January morning, parked outside a high school in York Region, there is a large bright blue bus with the words “Tour for Humanity.”
The mood inside is just as sombre as the weather outside. A group of Grade 7 students is listening quietly as an educator asks, “What do you know about the Holocaust?“
Slowly, a handful of students raise their hands.
“Tour for Humanity is essentially a mobile classroom,” explained the Tour’s director Danielle Lurion. “It travels across the country reaching different schools … to reach communities that couldn’t necessarily come to us. We are based in Toronto Metropolitan City, but there are millions of people and millions of students in schools that are not able to come to us so we thought, well, how do we reach them?”
The students learn about the Holocaust, genocide and historical and contemporary human rights issues.
“The hope is that they will make one positive change, that they’ll take one thing that they learned today and they’ll apply it,” Lurion said. “The goal is not to have every student change the world, it’s to have one student change their world or the people around them. It’s to make them question something that they have learned before or to do further research on something that’s new that they’ve now learned.”
The bus has made its way through Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Quebec, inspiring students, community leaders and first responders to stand up against hate in their schools and communities.
“It’s almost impossible for students to understand the present without knowing the past and how it came to this point,” Lurion said.