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”.