The World Jewish Congress is pushing US lawmakers to make Holocaust education mandatory in all schools, citing statistics from a 2018 ballot revealing half of millennials can’t identify a single Nazi focus camp.
The WJC began a petition calling on Congress to “make Holocaust education mandatory in every school in the United States,” that has garnered 8,500 signatures up to now. The petition factors to an increase in antisemitism and warns that “the horrors of the Holocaust are fading from our collective memory, especially among millennials.”
It refers to statistics discovered in the 2018 Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study which surveyed 1,350 Americans aged 18 and over and located 49 p.c of millennials and 45 p.c of adults couldn’t identify a focus camp or ghetto in Europe in the course of the Holocaust. It additionally revealed that 41 p.c of millennials assume the variety of Jews killed in the Holocaust was two million or much less, relatively than six million.
‘The Never Again Education Act’ would create a grant program run by the Department of Education to present academics with coaching and instruments to train college students concerning the Holocaust “and the repercussions that hate and intolerance can have on our society.”
The invoice was reintroduced in January by Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) after failing to be enacted at a earlier session of Congress. California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island have already got legal guidelines requiring schools to train college students concerning the Holocaust.