WARSAW: 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 programme, organisers said yesterday.
“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 said yesterday.
“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 said yesterday.
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.
AFP
