SSRE represented at Beijing+20 India CSO National Consultation

Given its commitment to the empowerment of women, Society for Social Regeneration & Equity (SSRE) was represented at Beijing+20 India CSO National Consultation by its General Secretary, Advocate Shuma Talukdar. The National Consultation took place at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi from 11th to 12th August, 2014, and was attended by participants from across the country, marking a convergence of India's key civil society actors and organisations. It was held to review the twenty-year progress of the Beijing Platform for Action, an agenda for women's empowerment, which aims at accelerating the implementation of Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women. The platform reaffirms the fundamental principles set forth in the Vienna Declaration and Programme for Action, adopted by the World Conference on Human Rights. 

The event was organised to involve NGOs to strengthen national and global political commitment to implementation of the Bejing Platform for Action and the recommendations of the review processes.

The gathering was addressed among others by Dr. Rabeccas Tavares, Representative, UN Women Multi Country Office for India, Bhutan, Maldives & Sri Lanka.

12 critical areas were discussed:

1. Women & the environment

2. Women in power & decision making

3. The girl child

4. Women and the economy

5. Human rights of women 

6. Education, training of women

7. Institutional mechanisms

8. Women and health

9. Women & poverty

10. Violence against women

12. Women and the media

13. Women & armed conflicts.    

 

Call for Applications for SSRE Internships under its Holocaust Awareness Campaign

Society for Social Regeneration & Equity (SSRE), invites applications from postgraduate students in India, irrespective of academic discipline,  for six-month unpaid non-residential internships as part of its Holocaust Awareness Campaign. SSRE is an NGO registered under the Societies Act No. 21, 1860 (Registration number: 1551-2013-2014). It works for human rights, with particular focus on women, minorities and the marginalized, excluded and underprivileged sections of society, and for the promotion of interfaith amity through dialogue and understanding.

Raising awareness of the Holocaust is also one of the tasks that the United Nations is devoted to, and it even has a programme devoted solely to it [www.un.org/holocaustremembrance]. The objective of this exercise is to help the youth draw lessons from the Holocaust, the biggest genocide ever, so that the occurrence of mass violence can be prevented.

The interns will have the opportunity to work under the guidance of the Executive Director of the Youth Outreach Programme of SSRE, Dr. Navras Jaat Aafreedi, an eminent Holocaust educator in India, currently employed as Assistant Professor in Presidency University, Kolkata. 

He conducted a workshop on how to educate Indians about the Holocaust at an international conference on Holocaust education at the Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies in Jerusalem, Israel in 2012 and attended an International Holocaust Educator Institute at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, in September 2013. In June 2014 Dr. Aafreedi represented the Society for Social Regeneration & Equity (SSRE) at the third symposium of Salzburg Global Seminar’s series on Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention.  Salzburg Global Seminar is an independent non-profit organization based in Austria with the mission to challenge current and future leaders to solve issues of global concern. Dr. Aafreedi also organized the first ever Holocaust Films Retrospective in South Asia in 2009, with screenings at the University of Lucknow and Ambedkar University in Lucknow in 2009. His work for Holocaust awareness has also found mention on pages 169 and 170 of Lakehead University, Canada’s Professor Anna Guttman’s Writing Indians and Jews: Metaphorics of Jewishness in South Asian Literature, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2013 ((ISBN 978-1-137-33967-6) .

Holocaust was a genocide whose scale and magnitude cannot be matched by any other genocide that has taken place in the world. Although its study is particularly relevant for Indians because of the frequent occurrence of mass violence in India, yet it remains non-existent in the Indian academia. It is so perhaps because of the Indian reluctance to discuss mass violence. Mass Violence studies are perceived to be too sensitive to be discussed at educational institutions and even politically incorrect, illustrated by the absence of Indian Partition Studies as an academic discipline at Indian educational institutions. Holocaust education becomes even more important in the Indian context considering the growing popularity of Hitler in India. It is a paradox that in a country where the Jews have never suffered due to anti-Semitism and where it remains largely unknown even today, Hitler is gaining popularity, as manifested in the increase in the sale of his autobiography by fifteen percent in just a decade, the release of films in various Indian languages with the eponymous protagonist as the namesake of Hitler, the recent popularity of the name Aryan as a first name among Indians, and the growing demand for Hitler memorabilia.

Every intern will be expected to submit a detailed report at the end of each month and a six-month report at the end of the fellowship tenure. At the completion of the six-month internship, the intern would be awarded a certificate and a testimonial.

Application should include the following:

•  Curriculum Vitae
• A scanned image of the Student Identity Card
• Essay explaining why the applicant is interested in raising Holocaust awareness and what they intend to achieve by it and how. The applicant should explain their plan of action clearly with a tentative schedule.

 Applications should be emailed to social.regeneration.and.equity@gmail.com with the subject heading “SSRE Internship Application”.

SSRE the only Indian NGO to be represented at the Salzburg Global Seminar's Symposium on Holocaust Education & Genocide Prevention

Photo Courtsey: Salzburg Global Seminar

Society for Social Regeneration & Equity (SSRE) was represented by Dr. Navras Jaat Aafreedi, Executive Director of its Youth Outreach Programme (formerly the Secretary of SSRE) at the Salzburg Global Seminar’s third symposium on Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention, held at Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg, Austria from 21^st to 26^th June, 2014. The symposium, chaired by Dr. Klaus Mueller, European Representative of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, brought together forty-eight educators, representatives from civil society organizations, museums, memorials, policy makers, and others engaged in holocaust and genocide remembrance and education from twenty-nine countries, primarily from those outside Western Europe, North America and Israel. Society for Social Regeneration & Equity (SSRE) was the only organization from India to be represented at the symposium, which is part of a multi-year initiative on Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention that the Salzburg Global Seminar, an independent non-profit organization based in Austria with the mission to challenge current and future leaders to solve issues of global concern, has undertaken in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Austrian Future Fund and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

Dr. Aafreedi has been raising Holocaust Awareness in India for a number of years. He has to his credit the first ever Holocaust Films Retrospective in South Asia, held in 2009, with screenings at the University of Lucknow and Ambedkar University in Lucknow. He conducted a workshop on how to educate Indians about the Holocaust at an international conference on Holocaust education at the Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies in Jerusalem, Israel in 2012 and attended an International Holocaust Educator Institute at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, in September 2013. His work for Holocaust awareness has also found mention on pages 169 and 170 of Lakehead University, Canada’s Professor Anna Guttman’s Writing Indians and Jews: Metaphorics of Jewishness in South Asian Literature, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2013 (ISBN 978-1-137-33967-6). Society for Social Regeneration & Equity (SSRE) is the only Indian organization to have launched a Holocaust Education Project.

The symposium focused on the following issues:

1. How to bring the lessons of the Holocaust to future generations, especially in the world beyond Europe, North America and Israel
2. Ways to teach and build awareness about the root causes of the Holocaust and other genocides, drawing on experiences from around the globe; and
3. Strategies to counteract Holocaust and genocide denial and distortion

Participants reflected on the state of Holocaust and genocide education in their own countries and considered the following key questions:

• As the twenty-first century moves forward, what lessons can be drawn from the Holocaust and those elements that led to xenophobia, intolerance, hatred and the outbreak of horrific crimes against humanity?
• Can the Holocaust function as a reference point for understanding contemporary genocides?
• Can approaches to Holocaust education such as those designed and implemented in IHRA countries be effective in other countries? And conversely, what can educators within the IHRA learn from programs in other countries?
• If we agree that inter-generational dialogue is a key element in fostering tolerance among the next generation, how do we bring the young people into it? How can policymakers and opinion-leaders be engaged in such a dialogue?
• What is the role of civil society leaders in building a culture of awareness among the younger generation of the horrors that hate speech and intolerance can unleash? How can opinion-leaders and educational policymakers be engaged in this process?
• How can students and teachers accept events which happened in a very different cultural and socio-economic context as relevant to their own situation?
• What strategies have been tested to counter Holocaust and genocide denial and distortion?

SSRE Free Medical Checkup and Medicine Distribution Camp at Nagaon

Society for Social Regeneration & Equity (SSRE), in association with Human Action for Rural Development (HARD), held a Medical Camp for children and pregnant women in Nagaon in Assam on 28th January, 2014, at which our doctors saw patients absolutely free of charge and also gave them free medicines. People from the poorest section of society and those belonging to the religious minority there visited the camp in large numbers and benefited from the services offered at the camp. The camp was held under the supervision of the President of SSRE, Mrs Shuma Talukdar.

SSRE represented at Australia India Youth Dialogue

Society for Social Regeneration & Equity (SSRE) was represented by its secretary, Dr Navras Jaat Aafreedi, at the third annual conference of the Australia India Youth Dialogue (AIYD) held in Hyderabad and New Delhi in India from 27^th to 30^th January, 2014. He was one of the fifteen Indians selected to indulge in a dialogue with fifteen selected Australians from different walks of life. Dr Aafreedi was selected for it in recognition of his work to promote peace, harmony, amity and understanding through dialogue. During the two years, 2008-2010, when he was a Fellow of the Centre for Communication and Development Studies (CCDS), Pune, under its youth outreach programme called Open Space, he organized a series of dialogues in his hometown Lucknow, called Diversity Dialogue, involving youth from fifteen different countries. The dialogues organized by him went a long way in breaking stereotypes, removing misunderstandings, eliminating misconceptions and building trust between foreign students resident in Lucknow and their Indian peers. His work finds mention in an article that appeared in the prestigious Indian news magazine Outlook.

During the discussions, Dr Aafreedi drew attention to the unpleasant experiences Western women in particular often go through in India. He attributed the problem to the widely held misconceptions about Western women in India. According to him, Indian perceptions of western women are formed not as a result of any direct contact with them, but by the images they see in films and magazines. Indians generally fail to realize that those are pictures of women in glamorous professions and not of the common women, and end up perceiving them to be of easy virtue because of their being dressed in attires which are not considered modest in contemporary India. It is beyond their comprehension that the understanding of modesty varies from one region to the other, from one culture to the other, and that instead of being judgmental about other cultures they ought to appreciate and celebrate the cultural diversity of the world. 

Dr Aafreedi divulged how the Society for Social Regeneration & Equity (SSRE) intends to rope in the foreign students enrolled at institutions in India to speak about their culture, values and family life at campuses across the country with the aim of breaking the stereotypes of Westerners as adulterous people with no moral values that thrive among the Indian masses, as part of the massive awareness campaign it plans to launch.