Greece

Greece

TOLI has organized yearly Holocaust and human rights education seminars for teachers in Greece since 2017, in partnership with the Jewish Museum of Greece and held under the auspices of the Ministry of Education in Greece.

Every year, the seminar gathers between 30 and 40 teachers committed to teaching about the Holocaust and human rights. The teachers are engaged in a learning process that starts with unpacking identities and understanding the devastating role that stereotypes and prejudices played and continue to play in our lives and our societies. Historical presentations about the Jewish presence in the Greek geographical area throughout the centuries, the Holocaust in Europe, and specifically the Holocaust in Greece, offer an important foundation from which to further analyze the causes and consequences of this atrocity.

Participants hear survivor testimonies, either live and recorded, and reflect upon the roles people took during the Holocaust as upstanders, bystanders, collaborators, and on the motivations behind those choices. A highlight of the seminar is the guided tour of the Jewish Museum of Greece. During the seminar, participants work together to learn about and develop new methods of teaching about the Holocaust, including the use of testimony and the wider framework of human rights education.

They leave with a concrete action plan for putting what they have learned into practice and are connected to a network through which they can share information about relevant resources and support for initiatives on teaching about the Holocaust, human rights, and social justice.

The seminar in Greece incorporates a methodology designed to ensure the basic principles of active participation, experiential learning and a human rights-based approach to education. The seminar offers a balanced approach between cognitive and emotional elements and time for reflection; between the information about the horrors of the Holocaust and about the life of Jewish people before and after, for a more complex narrative; between reflection and action, recognizing that learning is not enough, and that acting upon what was learned is the key to social change.

2025 Seminar

We were pleased to launch our 2025 international seminar season with a program in Athens, Greece. Under the auspices of Greece’s Ministry of Education, Religious Affairs and Sport, the four-day program was organized in partnership with the Jewish Museum of Greece which hosted the opening reception and dinner and provided tours of its beautiful museum. This was our seventh annual seminar held there.

Thirty teachers from across Greece attended programming at our partner organization, the Goethe Institute, and learned from experts about the Holocaust in Europe; Romaniote and Sephardic Jews in Greece; addressed topics on contemporary antisemitism and how stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination can take hold in a society; as well as focused on the disturbing trend of Holocaust distortion, including Holocaust inversion and ways to counter it. They were also moved by a presentation from Alexandros Simcha, a hidden child during the occupation of Athens.

Impact Grants

Graduates of the seminar have the opportunity to apply for an impact grant to develop projects related to Holocaust education and social justice. The grant consists of financial support and continuous mentorship throughout the school year. Every year, about 10 educators from Greece benefit from the TOLI Impact Grant Program.