NEW YORK/PARIS (EJP)---An American Jewish organization fighting anti-Semitism in the world praised a controversial proposal by President Nicolas Sarkozy that each French pupil in the last year of primary school should adopt one of the 11,000 Jewish children from France who were murdered in the Holocaust.
"As the number of survivors diminishes over time, so does the opportunity for schoolchildren to establish an intimate link as a means of profoundly instilling in them the lessons of the Holocaust,” Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor who was hidden from the Nazis by his Polish-Catholic nursemaid, said.
"President Sarkozy’s innovative initiative would create a personal connection that will stand the test of time and serve every generation," Foxman, who was hidden from the Nazis by his Polish-Catholic nursemaid, added.
Sarkozy made the proposal earlier this month in an address to the annual dinner of CRIF, the umbrella body of French Jewish organizations.
"Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who have been progressively excluded from their school, separated from their family and loaded in trains without return."
In a letter to President Sarkozy, ADL praised the proposed educational initiative as "creative and important" and said that it could serve as a model for other European leaders to adopt in promoting Holocaust education, awareness and remembrance in the schools.
The French president’s proposal surprised the nation with his plan, opening a debate among psychiatrists, educators, parents and politicians who predicted that requiring students to identify with a specific victim would traumatize them.
While France’s chief rabbi Joseph Sitruk and other Jewish leaders agreed with Sarkozy’s idea, Simone Veil, a Auschwitz survivor and honorary president of the Paris-based Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, expressed dismay over the suggestion.
"It is not comprehensible and it is not right," Veil, who attended the CRIF dinner, said. "It is impossible to demand that a child that age identify with a dead child. This is a too heavy burden."
The head of the Foundation, David de Rothschild, later praised the president’s "generous intention" but said the proposal must be "adjusted." “We must listen to the teachers to find how better to speak about the Shoah.”
French Education Minister Xavier Darcos said the plan could be adjusted so that an entire class could collectively honor an individual child victim of the Holocaust.
Darcos, who stated that "one out of two high school pupil doesn’t know what is the Shoah," announced a meeting with teachers and Holocaust historians, to discuss how best to implement Sarkozy’s plan. Simone Veil also accepted to be involved in the discussion.
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial and Institute in Jerusalem, expressed his support for the plan, in a letter sent to France’s ambassador to Israel.
“We express our support and our gratitude for this initiative which is faithful to France’s tradition of humanism,” Yossef Lapid and Avner Shalev, the two heads of Yad Vashem said in the letter.
According to a poll published last week, 61 percent of the French people opposed the president’s proposal.