Sharaka Brings Expanded Arab Delegation To March Of The Living, As Part Of Holocaust-Education Program

Sharaka, a nongovernmental initiative that grows the impact of the Abraham Accords by transforming the vision of people-to-people peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors into a reality, brought 22 Arab participants to this year’s International March of the Living in Poland as part of a first-of-its-kind year-long program that promotes tolerance through Holocaust education.

The delegation from the Sharaka Tolerance Program—influencers, journalists and academics and NGO activists from Morocco, Bahrain, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Algeria together with Israeli Arabs—participated in the 3-kilometer (1.86-mile) march on April 18 leading from the Auschwitz concentration camp to the Birkenau extermination camp on Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah).

Sharaka’s launch of its broader Holocaust-education initiative in the Arab world was inspired by the historic delegation that the nonprofit brought to March of the Living last year, which marked the first time that a pan-Arab delegation publicly partook in such a solidarity march.

Mohammed Hatimi, a history professor at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University in Fez, who was part of the delegation, said: “An Arab proverb says that seeing what happens on the spot is better than listening to what is said about what happened there. For this reason, nothing beats a visit to a place of memory that is universal in scope. To be present at Auschwitz and to participate in the march is an intense event that reinforces the conviction that I must do my best to teach about the Holocaust and to learn from it. We all need such a pilgrimage for our own education, but also to pay tribute to the millions of victims of human horror, horror caused by radicalism taken to the extreme.”