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Project Aladdin at Auschwitz
A delegation of almost 200 personalities and government officials from forty countries has visited the grounds of the former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz. The guests included former Senegalese President Abdulaye Wade, UN Deputy Secretary General Asha-Rose Migiro, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and special delegates and ambassadors from Egypt, the United States, France, Iraq, Morocco, and Turkey.
The visit was part of Project Aladdin, a non-governmental initiative launched in 2009 under the auspices of UNESCO with the goal of promoting intercultural dialogue, particularly among Muslims and Jews. One of the aims of the Paris-based Aladdin Project is combating Holocaust denial and encouraging knowledge of the Holocaust in the Muslim world.
Commenting on the visit, Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Director Piotr M.A. Cywiński said that "the Memorial has become a symbol on a global scale. The tragedy of the innocent victims of Auschwitz has become a civilizational reference point. Therefore rejecting the message of this place and the history of the Holocaust would be not only a moral error but also a marginalization of memory, an oversimplification of the understanding of the world, and a risk of universal misunderstanding. This visit contains within itself the dimension of a profound testimony, and the participants deserve gratitude for this testimony," said Cywiński.
After the visit, the participants in the meeting paid tribute to the victims. At the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the former Head Rabbi of Israel Meir Lau, the Archbishop of Paris André Vingt-Trois, and the Grand Mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina Mustafa Ceric led ecumenical prayers.
This was not the first multicultural visit to Auschwitz. In September 2009, as part of the Cracow Congress for Peace, representatives of the world's great religions offered homage to the victims of Auschwitz. A group of religious leaders including cardinals and bishops, rabbis, and representatives of Islam and Buddhism took part in the observances on that occasion.
A month earlier, eight of the most influential North American Imams and Muslim leaders visited the Memorial and issued a statement in which they used emphatic language to confront Holocaust denial: "We condemn all actions that deny this historical fact and proclaim that any such denial or attempts to justify this tragedy are contrary to the Islamic code of ethics."
In 2003 a group of several hundred Jews, Israeli Arabs, and Palestinians accompanied by two hundred French citizens, the majority of whom were Jewish or Muslim, visited the site of the camp. The Remembrance for Peace association, which is active in Israel and France, organized that meeting.
Since November 2010 the Museum website has been offering free downloads of the richly illustrated brochure Auschwitz: History and the Present Day in more than a dozen languages including Arabic and Persian. The brochure is dedicated to the history of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp and the current activity of the Memorial.
More than thirty million people have visited the Auschwitz Memorial since its founding in 1947 . The statistics show that over thirty thousand of them were citizens of Arab countries.
