August 17, 2012

Brazil’s Jewish community announces creation of Anne Frank ‘educational network’

JTA

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Anne Frank in May 1942

Brazil’s Jewish community sent directors of five Brazilian schools named after Anne Frank on a Holocaust study tour in Amsterdam.

The study trip is the first step in the creation of an educational network, according to an announcement by CONIB, the central body representing the Brazilian Jewish community.

The network’s schools would teach tolerance according to methods developed by the Amsterdam-based Anne Frank House educational institute. 

In the Netherlands, the delegation met Holocaust survivor Nanette König, who studied with Anne Frank. They visited Westerbork concentration camp, where Koning and Frank awaited deportation to Auschwitz. The visitors returned to Brazil last month.

“We learned a lot and there was a lot of crying, a lot of emotion,” said Marcelo Lins, a Brazilian journalist who joined the delegation. “We learned that the Dutch Jewish community was decimated, and we saw that, today, Amsterdam is once more a tolerant city, where tolerance is worked on.”

In Brazil, the schools will apply the Anne Frank House teaching methods and materials “which spread the values which Anne Frank represented, serving tolerance and the fight against anti-Semitism and racism,” the announcement by CONIB read.

The trip was organized the educators’ delegation together with the Sao Paulo Jewish community and the Anne Frank House, an educational institute.

In parallel, CONIB has launched a national essay contest about Anne Frank - a German-born Jewish teenager who hid in the house on Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht for two years. She was arrested on August 4, 1944, and sent to Westerbork. The diary she kept became an international bestseller. The house became a museum which last year drew a record 1,104,233 registered visitors.