29 June, 2022

IHRS responds to remittance on the Living History Forum

The government authority The Living History Forum was created in 2003 as part of the former Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson´s information campaign aiming at increasing the knowledge on the Holocaust among Swedish youth. The information campaign also included the launch of the book “Tell ye your children” by Paul A Levine och Stéphane Bruchfeld (see photo and download the book here), the initiative to the Task Force (currently IHRA) etc. When former Prime Minister Stefan Löfven decided to establish the Swedish Holocaust Museum, the Ministry of Culture gave Ph.D. Ylva Wibaeus the task to lead the investigation on the future of the Living History Forum. The investigation, which can be downloaded in Swedish here, is on remittance and the IHRS was one of the institutions which was given a chance to respond. The IHRS concurred in the proposal of the investigation to change the instruction to the Living History Forum, but emphasized that the investigation should have gone further in its proposal and changed the sentence to “lessons from history” (instead of “lessons from the Holocaust”). If the former is chosen, the division between the Swedish Holocaust Museum and the Living History Forum will be clearer, and it will make sense to give the Living History Forum tasks on other forms of racism and issues regarding minorities (which doesn´t have anything to do with the Holocaust). Read the response in Swedish here Remissvar IHRS. See also a link to the other responses here.

BILDTEXT: Tell ye your children by Paul A Levine and Stéphane Bruchfeld cover