2,000 children in Portugal visit Porto's Holocaust museum to mark Int'l Holocaust Remembrance Day

On Friday, around 2,000 middle and high school students from across Portugal visited the Holocaust Museum in the northern city of Porto, Portugal to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The day was capped off by an emotional ceremony which honored the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis between 1938 and 1945. 

The students were escorted through the museum with a heavy security detail on the premises, against the backdrop of rising global antisemitism. The museum has been closed to the general public since the October 7 Massacre due to growing safety concerns for the Jewish community and other visitors.

Staff at the museum prepared an educational program for visiting students, teaching the story of how genocide was perpetrated against Europe's Jewish population.

Schools held individual memorial services

Every participating school held its own memorial ceremony, complete with lighting a memorial candle in the museum’s Names Room, a special space that documents the names of tens of thousands of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. 

Porto's Holocaust Museum has hosted at least 150,000 youth since it opened three years ago. It is the only one of its kind on the Iberian Peninsula.

Among the exhibits at the site are a reproduction of sleeping cells from the Auschwitz death camp and documents that belonged to survivors who fled the Nazis to Porto. 

“Every year, about 50,000 youth visit the museum from schools all over the country, a number that constitutes about 5% of all school children in the country. Here they communicate with us and we feel they understand and love us,” said Michael Rothwell, director of the Holocaust Museum, whose grandfather was murdered in Auschwitz.