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Sierra Leone and Israel

Jake Wallis Simons on the unusually deep harmony between Christians and Muslims in Sierra Leone, and Josh Spiro on the dilemmas of teaching children about the Holocaust in Israel.

Sierra Leone enjoys an unusually high degree of harmony between Christians and Muslims. Churches and mosques are open to everyone, and Christmas and Ramadan are both national holidays. The president, a Christian, regularly prays at a large mosque. But as Jake Wallis Simons reports, this tolerance is now under threat, because of the growing influence of a mosque built by foreign Islamist hardliners who also set up a radio station. Matters weren鈥檛 helped either by two Christian sisters who claimed Jesus told them only Christians would go to heaven.

It's Holocaust Memorial Day in much of Europe - though not in Israel or the US, where that's still a few months away - and perhaps a good moment to think about how to teach children about the Holocaust. But as Josh Spero asks, how do you do that without giving the children nightmares? When the Israeli education minister announced Holocaust education was going to be compulsory, a storm broke out as plenty of adults remember being traumatised by films or photos they were shown as young children. But now the International School of Holocaust Studies in Jerusalem is producing age-appropriate material, that 鈥渞escues the individual from the piles of bodies鈥, including a book that a Jewish illustrator trapped in a Czech ghetto in 1944 painted for his three-year old, to give him a vision of life outside the ghetto, rather than the horrors within.

Presenter: Pascale Harter
Producer: Arlene Gregorius
Photo of mosque in the eastern Sierra Leone city of Koidu, by Issouf Sanogo of AFP/Getty Images

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11 minutes

Last on

Mon 27 Jan 2014 09:50GMT

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  • Mon 27 Jan 2014 02:50GMT
  • Mon 27 Jan 2014 09:50GMT