A weeklong training program in South Africa brought together teachers from across the African continent to learn how to teach World War II and the Holocaust, an initiative aimed at promoting understanding amid rising antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment around the world.

Last month, South Africa’s Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Center (CTHGC) held its program for African high school history teachers on teaching one of the darkest chapters of human history in the context of today’s world.

In partnership with Yahad–In Unum, a French Jewish nonprofit that documents mass executions of Jews and Roma during the Holocaust, the program brought together 40 teachers from South Africa, Nigeria, Namibia, Botswana, and Eswatini.

Michal Chojak, director of Yahad–In Unum’s Research Center, explained that the initiative provides teachers with essential resources on the Holocaust and how to relate its lessons to the experiences of their local communities.

“While Holocaust education is important everywhere, in South Africa it takes on added significance,” Chojak told The Algemeiner in an exclusive interview.

“Given the country’s history of apartheid, teaching about the Holocaust offers a powerful lens to understand the devastating consequences of state-led discrimination and violence,” he continued.

Yahad–In Unum, which runs educational initiatives with local partners around the world, brought this one-week program, “Teaching WWII and the Holocaust in the Classroom,” to South Africa for the first time.

According to Chojak, the program aims to empower teachers to confidently teach this history, while fostering a society rooted in respect and human rights.

The program comes at a time when basic knowledge of the Holocaust is lacking in countries around the world.

While data on Africa is less easily available, an eight-country survey released in January found large gaps in education about the Nazis’ mass murder of 6 million Jews during World War II, including among young people, across the US, UK, France, Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. In the US, for example, 48 percent of those surveyed could not name a single concentration camp used by the Nazi regime — including Auschwitz, the largest and most infamous of the camps.

The survey also found that many respondents did not know or believe the number of Jews murdered, with a significant number of young adults saying they had not heard of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, many people reported encountering Holocaust denial or distortion, especially online.

During the recent training program in Africa, participants learned to work with primary sources, including video testimonies, develop group activities for students, and explore Holocaust history in depth.

They also analyzed case studies such as Apartheid, the Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group, and the genocide of the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria.

For participants, meeting a Holocaust survivor from South Africa in person was among the most powerful moments during the seminar, Chojak explained.

“Hearing directly from a survivor made the history feel personal and real — not just about numbers, but about individual lives, families, and human experiences,” he told The Algemeiner.

By providing educators with reliable tools and resources, the program helps them develop a factual and accurate approach to teaching the Holocaust and other local atrocities.

“An important outcome is raising awareness among teachers to avoid false or dangerous comparisons and to challenge misleading or fake historical narratives,” Chojak said.

“The goal is not only to teach about the past but to encourage responsible action for the future, especially in a divided world,” he continued. “African educators play a key role in fostering critical thinking and encouraging students to engage thoughtfully with history.”

When launching such an initiative, Chojak also explained, a major challenge is that events like the Holocaust are often seen as “the history of the other” if they did not occur locally.

“The more educators can adapt the material to local contexts, the more meaningful and impactful it becomes for both teachers and students,” he said.

In South Africa, Holocaust education became part of the national curriculum in 2007 as part of a broader effort to emphasize human rights and foster understanding of other instances of violence and abuse.

However, Jakub Nowakowski, director of the CTHGC, said that many teachers lack the tools and knowledge to teach this history effectively.

“Bringing Holocaust education to South Africa is important not only as part of global history, but because it offers a language to describe their own experiences of suffering,” Nowakowski told The Algemeiner in an exclusive interview.

“The Holocaust serves as both an educational tool and a mirror for contemporary South Africans to reflect on and analyze local atrocities,” he continued.

The program came to South Africa at a controversial time for the government. It was held while Pretoria continued pursuing its case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN’s top court, accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.

Israeli leaders have lambasted the case as an “obscene exploitation” of the Genocide Convention, an international treaty conceived largely in response to the Holocaust that criminalizes genocide, noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.

South Africa’s Jewish community has also lambasted the case as “grandstanding” rather than actual concern for those killed in the Middle Eastern conflict.

The South African government has been one of the fiercest critics of Israel on the international stage since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel, the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Through the weeklong training, however, participants learn why the Holocaust is significant to South Africa, examining its global impact and its influence on the country’s own struggles, including the fight against colonialism and apartheid.

According to Nowakowski, the program provided teachers with the knowledge and tools to foster human rights and democratic values. It also highlighted the warning signs and societal changes that paved the way for the Holocaust and other mass atrocities.

“The biggest takeaway was the willingness and enthusiasm of the teachers to participate in the training,” Nowakowski said.

“Participants showed a genuine interest in learning about the Holocaust,” he continued. “Teachers were eager to listen, discuss, and ask questions, actively engaging with the material.”