Germany: Party lifts requirement for Muslim students to visit concentration camps

Via Jerusalem Post:

The governing Christian Social Union party in Bavaria’s state government sparked a row over excluding Muslim students and other immigrant pupils from visiting concentration camps as part of Holocaust educational programs.

“There are a lot of children from Muslim families who do not have a connection to our past,” said CSU politician Klaus Steiner in the parliamentary debate justifying the exclusion, according to a May article in the paper Main Post. We have to approach this topic carefully with these children, Steiner added.

The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, called for an obligatory educational visit to a concentration camp for all German students. The Haifa-born Schuster is a practicing physician in Bavaria.

Opposition politicians sharply criticized the CSU, which is also Merkel’s coalition partner in the Federal government, for seeking to exclude certain ethnic and religious groups from participating in the full Holocaust educational program. more