An exhibition about the Holocaust has opened in the Cuban capital Havana, the country’s first such educational resource, but so far it is attracting more foreign visitors than locals.

Instigated by ORT Cuba National Director William Miller two years ago, “We Remember – The Holocaust and the Creation of a Living Community” combines text, photographs and video to enable the island’s resurgent Jewish community to better understand its roots and for the general public to learn about the nadir of modern civilization.

Knowledge of the Holocaust is considered to be next to non- existent among Cuba’s non- Jewish population, and the exhibition has yet to draw widescale attention locally.

“ People passing by the Sephardic Centre notice that the exhibition is here and come in but we’re working hard to spread the word among teachers and the general population to visit. We actually get more foreign visitors than local ones at the moment,” Miller said.

The exhibition examines the conditions in Europe that forced some 11,000 Jews to seek refuge in Cuba between 1933 and 1942; it looks at the experiences of those refugees, and it explores the contributions made by the Jews who remained in Cuba to the country’s political, social and economic development.

“For a very long time Jews assimilated but now, with the renaissance of the Cuban Jewish community, many people are coming back and looking for their roots so they need to know how the community started here. This exhibition will tell them,” Miller said.

The major partners in setting up the exhibition– the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre (SWC), and the Jewish Cuba Connection– are all based in California as is Conscious Display, the company that designed the exhibits. The Institute also provided video testimony clips from its archives, while narrative and photographs from the SWC’s “Courage to Remember” exhibition were also made available.