Introduction

08 December 2008

‘Never again’ was the hope of humankind after the Holocaust. Since then we have had Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and now Darfur. These examples are a stain on the record of humanity, and EUJS is determined that the world should remember, acknowledge, and internalize these experiences, so that humanity as a whole should not repeat the same mistakes again and again.

Young people need to be educated, both about their own history and about the history of others, in order to find common ground and to search for ways to strive towards a more peaceful and tolerant world.

It is with this in mind that Shared Memories - Collective Action, a program on genocide, was launched by EUJS together with the “Cercle des étudiants Rwandais de Belgique” (Belgian union of Rwandan Students) and with the support of the World Jewish Congress, Future Generation Department. The mission to Rwanda in April 2006, bringing Jewish Students and Tutsi students, most of them survivors of the Tutsi genocide, allowed the students to exchange experiences, feelings, and ideas. This in turn strengthened the connection between the groups, by understanding the pain of one another and sharing in the determination that similar atrocities must never be allowed to occur again.

The goals of the campaign are:

• To share a common history with other people who also have their identity shaped by genocide.
• To learn about the universal dimension of the Shoah.
• To understand the processes and the mechanisms that allows genocide to happen.
• To set an agenda of how to raise sensitivities and challenge ideologies that encourages or allows genocide to take place.