The co-organization with the Netanyahu regime’s embassy of a student expression contest on the theme of the Holocaust insults the victims of the Holocaust

 

25 November 2025, AKEL C.C. Press Office, Nicosia

The announcement by the Ministry of Education of the holding of a student creative expression contest on the theme of the Holocaust and the stories of its victims is a commendable initiative. The young generation must be taught the truth about the inhumane nature of Hitlerism and the unimaginable atrocities it inflicted on humanity, with the Jews as its first victims.

However, the co-organization of the competition with the Israeli Embassy—the state that is currently accountable to international criminal justice for the crime of genocide it is committing in Gaza — is a reversal of common sense, an insult to the victims of the Holocaust themselves, and an endorsement of the perpetrators of the contemporary crimes being committed against humanity.

The Ministry of Education should understand that the memory of the Holocaust has a mission to serve the truth and, at the same time, to educate those consciences that do not accept or justify new genocides, ethnic cleansing, and atrocities against civilians and children.

What the Ministry of Education and the Christodoulides government fails to understand, however, is understood by millions of Jews all over the world who oppose the crimes being carried out by the Israeli state against the Palestinian people, while, -not coincidentally- the modern far right, the political descendants of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, have sided with Netanyahu and his barbaric war against the Palestinian people.

AKEL calls on the Ministry of Education to stop the co-organization of the competition with the Israeli embassy and to continue it without elements that offend and negate the messages it should be conveying.