ZAGREB, February 1, 2018 – Lawrence Weinbaum, the Director-General of the Israel section of the World Jewish Congress, an international federation of Jewish communities and organisations, on Wednesday severely criticised the exhibition staged at the Jasenovac Memorial Centre, describing it as one of the worst exhibitions he had seen.
This exhibition is one of the examples of clouding the history of the Holocaust, and this trend is present in a series of eastern European countries, Weinbaum said at a panel discussion on the education about the Holocaust, which was held in the offices of the Jewish Community of Zagreb on Wednesday evening.
After visiting earlier on Wednesday the memorial centre at Jasenovac, where the Ustasha regime had run a death camp from 1941 to 1945, Weinbaum who is also the director-general of the non-partisan forum called Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR), said that both the design of the Jasenovac exhibition and technical implementation of the exhibition were bad. He called on local experts and professional to cooperate with their colleagues from abroad to improve the situation.
Weinbaum said that this was not about a lack of knowledge but an attempt to negate and cloud the issue. It requires a mature society that will not shift the responsibility onto others, this Israeli researcher said.
Over 30,000 Jews were killed in Croatia (in WW2), and many lunatics refuse to accept that, he told the panel discussion.
Croatian historian Neven Budak said that since 2000 the situation regarding teaching about the Holocaust had improved markedly, and that nowadays there were many textbooks and materials for teaching and that teachers were also being trained additionally in Croatia and abroad for this topic. However, some more studies to assess the real state of affairs are necessary, he added.
The Croatian Culture Ministry’s representative, Dražen Klinčić, said that the Ministry was taking efforts in relation to the commemoration of Jasenovac and many Jewish cemeteries throughout the country.
The head of the Shoah Academy, Sanja Zoričić Tabaković, said that the aim of education about the Holocaust was to make the society more sensitive to the weak. She said that the education about the Holocaust in Croatian schools was insufficient and the proof of that was indifference towards the Holocaust.
Shoah Academy is a project established by the Jewish Community of Zagreb and the Representative of the Jewish National Minority in the City of Zagreb.
