The Neshama Experience for Students

An active approach to Holocaust remembrance

The NESHAMA project invites students to become active participants in Holocaust remembrance rather than passive learners. It connects them with remembrance sites, educators, and peers from across Europe, creating a space where historical knowledge, critical thinking, and personal commitment come together.

By the end of the programme, students are not only better informed about the past, but also prepared to act as Young Ambassadors of Remembrance, carrying forward the values of dignity, responsibility, and resistance to antisemitism and intolerance, and sharing it with others.

Becoming an active Young Holocaust Ambassador through the project journey

Local training: connecting national history to European memory

The first stage of the programme takes place locally, in close connection with each student's remembrance site. This allows students to discover the history, mission, and current educational work of the site, while deepening their understanding of the Holocaust and Jewish life in their own country and region.

Through visits, workshops, and guided activities, students connect national history with the wider European context. This grounded approach helps them see how the Holocaust belongs both to the history of their own country and to the shared history of Europe as a whole. To fully embrace their place of remembrance, the young ambassadors prepared a presentation on their place of remembrance and local history for the meeting in Paris, which they shared with the other NESHAMA ambassadors.

Common online sessions: lectures and Holocaust testimonies

Students then take part in common online sessions shared by all project partners. These sessions combine lectures and testimonies, giving participants both historical knowledge and direct encounters with voices connected to Holocaust memory.

The lectures cover key themes such as the history of the Holocaust in Europe, gender perspectives, pre-war Jewish life and culture, and remembrance policies. The testimony sessions are central to the programme, because they allow students to hear personal stories, ask questions, and reflect on the responsibility of transmission across generations in order to become the voices to their voices.

On-site meetings: Paris and Oświęcim

The programme also includes two major in-person meetings, one in Paris and one in Oświęcim. In Paris, students gather for study visits, exchanges, and educational activities that connect the city's Jewish history and remembrance landscape with the broader project.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau camps visit gives students a powerful collective experience of memory on site, deepening their understanding of the Holocaust through direct engagement with one of its most significant places of history and remembrance. Together, these meetings strengthen the shared identity of the cohort and make remembrance a lived, collective experience.

What students gain from the NESHAMA programme

NESHAMA helps students build historical knowledge related to the Holocaust and Jewish life in Europe, but it also develops their ability to think critically, compare perspectives, and understand the consequences of prejudice, exclusion, and dehumanization. It encourages them to engage with history through both local realities and European dialogue. By encouraging peer-to-peer education, the NESHAMA project allows students to share their projects, reflections, ideas and knowledge with their peers.

The programme is designed so that students leave with a stronger sense of responsibility, a clearer understanding of Jewish history and culture, and the tools to speak up against antisemitism, discrimination, all forms of intolerance but also Holocaust denial and revisionism.