Sweden: Malmö launches campaign to tackle anti-Semitism

Via The Local:

A new campaign launched in southern Swedish city Malmö hopes to fight anti-Semitism by encouraging thousands of school students to talk about the issue.

The project, a combined effort between the Jewish Community of Malmö and the City of Malmö, will focus on creating dialogue about anti-Semitism by exploring the shared experiences between the city’s Jews and many of its young people.

“We are actually quite similar in our experiences. Many Jews here are children or grandchildren of refugees who fled war and came to Sweden,” Jewish Community of Malmö chairman Fredrik Sieradzki told The Local.

“That’s the great thing about this new education programme, it uses that shared experience and it makes it easier to talk.”

The project will use movies, exercises and discussion materials on the topics of anti-Semitism, racism, and seeking refuge to help encourage discussions, with 288 teachers receiving special training.

When the materials were tested among different school groups, the result was that adolescents with similar experiences started to get more involved in discussions.

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