27 June 2001
Seminar on Holocaust lessons held in Brest

 About 70 history teachers from schools and universities in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine took part in an international seminar in Brest from June 21 to 24 dedicated to teaching lessons of Holocaust.
Taking part were World War II veterans, former Brest Ghetto prisoners, and schoolchildren from the three countries who won competitions for the best Holocaust study. The seminar has been organized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Foundation, Russia's Holocaust foundation and the Brest-based Holocaust Education Center. Addressing the seminar participants, Ety Katzir-Kaslasy, counsellor and consul of the Israeli embassy in Minsk, said that Brest hosted the seminar because it fought the first battle against the Nazis when Germany invaded the Soviet Union 60 years ago.
"Today we face the challenge of teaching the next generation the facts and the lessons of the Holocaust. We must teach the facts, lest they be forgotten or worse, distorted by so called 'revisionist historians' who engage in the most monstrous perversion of their profession," Ms.
Katzir-Kaslasy said. One of the main lessons of the Holocaust is that no
society, no matter how technologically advanced, no matter how cultured, is immune from degenerating into murderous violence, which is fed by ethnic hatred, she said.
Ms. Katzir-Kaslasy recalled that on June 11 the memorial dedicated to the Martyrs of the Ghetto in Brest was shamefully desecrated by swastika and anti-Semitic slogans. Holocaust seminars will be organized in Belarus on a regular basis, Svetlana Mashchenko, an employee of the Israeli embassy's information service, told BelaPAN. She said that a Holocaust course would soon be included in school curricular in Russia. A similar course is being prepared in Belarus and the Israeli embassy offers its assistance to any initiatives in this direction, Ms. Mashchenko said.