Fourteen
Muslim clerics from across the globe will visit the former Nazi German
Auschwitz death camp in southern Poland next week as part of a Holocaust
awareness and anti-genocide program, organisers said Friday.
“This is an
opportunity for imams who are influential in their communities to look at the
Holocaust first hand and to go to Auschwitz, to see what that kind of hatred
led to,” Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich told AFP on Friday.
“It’s to
make sure that civilisation doesn’t fail again.”
The visiting
imams are from Bosnia, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine,
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States.
They will
also visit a new museum in the Polish capital Warsaw focusing on centuries of
Jewish life before the Holocaust, John C. Taylor from the US State Department’s
Office of International Religious Freedom told AFP on Friday.
Meeting are
also planned with local Catholic, Muslim and Jewish religious leaders.
“If we want
the world to remember the horrors of the Holocaust so that neither genocide
against the Jews, nor anyone else should ever happen again, then we have an
obligation to have communal leaders understand what happened,” Schudrich said.
Muslim
leaders last visited Auschwitz in 2011 as part of an inter-faith delegation
including a hundred Jewish and Christian leaders from the Middle East, Africa
and Europe.
More than
one million people, mostly European Jews, perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau,
operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland from 1940 until it was liberated by
the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945.
The site was
one of six German death camps set up in occupied Poland, a country which was
home to pre-war Europe’s largest Jewish community.
Among the camp’s other victims were tens of
thousands of non-Jewish Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, gypsies, and anti-Nazi
resistance fighters from across Europe.
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