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Ontario just added mandatory Holocaust learning in Grade 6.
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A national Jewish organization is urging Quebec legislators to make Holocaust education compulsory in elementary schools.
“We recognize Quebec has improved the materials and curriculum in secondary schools, but we write to ask all parties in the National Assembly to support following Ontario’s example,” Marvin Rotrand, the national director of B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights, said in a letter this month to Quebec’s 125 MNAs.
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Ontario introduced mandatory Holocaust learning for the first time in elementary schools this fall. In Grade 6, ”students learn about the responses of the Canadian government to the Holocaust and the development of Canada’s responses to acts of hate and human rights violations,” Ontario’s education department says.
“We are taking action to counter anti-Semitism and hate because those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce said as he announced the curriculum change last year.
Rotrand told MNAs that education is “an important element in the fight against anti-Semitism.”
“New research indicates that when Holocaust education is provided, hate crimes and incidents against Jews decrease significantly,” he said. It “also shows that making Holocaust education mandatory reduces hate incidents targeting other racial and religious minorities.”
Rotrand cited preliminary findings of a study by RealityCheck Research. It found that in U.S. states with mandated Holocaust education, antisemitic crimes dropped by 55 per cent. Crimes against Black, LGBTQ2+, Latino and Muslim communities also fell.
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The researchers concluded that “holocaust education, in particular, increases the personal qualities of harmonious functioning in society, personal empowerment, and ‘justice activism,’ which is the quality of actively supporting diverse individuals, opposing racism, showing empathy, fighting injustice, believing in personal power to make a difference, advocating for strict punishments for hate crimes, and speaking up for minorities, with the goal of creating a fair and equitable society for all.”
B’nai Brith said it has contacted all provinces and is in discussions with several of them about introducing mandatory Holocaust education in elementary schools in the 2024-25 academic year.
The organization said it sent a letter to Education Minister Bernard Drainville in November 2022, and another to Premier François Legault in April.
“The only place we have no formal response is Quebec,” Rotrand said in an interview.
In April, a spokesperson for Education Minister Bernard Drainville told the Montreal Gazette the Quebec government “understands the sensitivity of the debate. However, we do not plan to change the elementary school curriculum for the moment.”
In 2022, B’nai Brith documented 722 antisemitic incidents in Quebec — 640 involving online hate, 41 harassment, 34 vandalism and seven violence. There were 828 episodes in 2021.
Several high-profile incidents have rocked Montreal’s Jewish community this year. Police arrested a minor after assaults on two Hasidic men in Outremont in January; the attacks were investigated as hate crimes. Vandals spray-painted black swastikas on the historic Bagg Street Synagogue in Plateau–Mont-Royal in March. In April, police arrested a 16-year-old boy in connection with the burning of Israeli flags taken from a West Island school.
Jewish community wants action after Montreal synagogue defaced with swastikas
Man sentenced for antisemitic incidents in Côte-St-Luc
Teen arrested after video shows Israeli flags being taken and burned
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