Cape
Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre has been criticised for failing to
acknowledge scale of violence and for not calling on Israel to end its
devastating onslaught
The Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre has refused to recognise the genocide in Gaza (MEE/Azad Essa)
Published date: 22 August 2025
Africa's first
Holocaust centre is facing a deluge of criticism from activists and
human rights advocates for failing to acknowledge and demand that Israel end its genocidal war on Gaza.
The Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre, which sits in the heart
of South Africa's "mother city", is facing accusations of complicity in
the devastating 22-month-long war, after adopting what its detractors
call a shameful position of silence.
More than 200,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded since
Israel went to war in Gaza in October 2023, with recent reports, based
on Israeli military intelligence data, claiming more than 80 percent of
those killed in the enclave until May of this year were civilians.
Kelly-Jo Bluen, a genocide scholar and member of South African Jews
For a Free Palestine (SAJFP), said that by choosing to remain silent on
the horrors unfolding in Gaza, the centre had "flagrantly
misappropriated the memory of our ancestors who resisted, fled and died
in the Nazi Holocaust in Europe to participate in the most egregious
genocidal complicity by genocide denialism."
"It has brought shame not only to its curatorial and managerial team, but onto the community," Bluen told Middle East Eye.
Like other Holocaust centres
around the world, the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre has been
under intense scrutiny over how it has responded to the carnage
unfolding in Gaza.
For more than a year, activists in South Africa have
said they have attempted to engage with the centre for it to change
track, including attempts at dialogue and raising public awareness over
the situation in Gaza.
However, they said that not only had the leadership refused to
acknowledge that a genocide was taking place, the museum also ignored
calls to collaborate with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) on an
exhibition showing both the destruction as well as the resilience of
Palestinians in Gaza.
According to the activists, the centre said it was waiting for a
final judgement from an international tribunal on the crime of genocide
in Gaza before it would adjust its educational programming.
Jakub Nowakowski, the director of the Holocaust and Genocide Centre,
told MEE that the decision did not "stem from indifference or a lack of
compassion, but rather from our long-standing policy not to incorporate
ongoing conflicts into our exhibitions".
"We are deeply disturbed by the violence and human suffering we are all
witnessing, and we share the hope that this war will end as soon as
possible," he said, adding that the centre maintained this approach for
other conflicts.
Nowakoswki maintains that the museum's responsibility is not to offer
political or legal judgments in "real time" but to instead equip
visitors with the tools to make their own decisions by looking at the
past.
"The moral challenge lies precisely in the fact that each of these
tragedies deserves recognition, and our role as a museum cannot be to
adjudicate between them in real time," he added.
Activists and scholars told MEE that the centre's silence over
Israel's assault on Gaza rendered it a bystander, and that it could
therefore be seen as a collaborator to the very crimes it urges visitors
to stand up to within its own walls.
"If a Holocaust Museum remains silent, or worse, goes into denial
while Palestinians face extermination, what purpose does it serve?"
Usuf Chikte, the coordinator for the PSC in Cape Town, told MEE.
As a Holocaust museum located in South Africa, the activists said,
the centre had the unique opportunity to incorporate the story of
Palestinian erasure as part of a larger curriculum of racial supremacy
that characterised the policies of Nazi Germany and apartheid South
Africa, as well as the state of Israel.
They pointed out that whereas the centre carefully connects the
conditions of apartheid South Africa to the treatment of Jews during
Nazi Germany without ever overstating it, it completely ignores both
the Nakba
- the forced displacement of Palestinians in 1948 that culminated in
the creation of Israel - and the charge of apartheid against Israel.
Whereas academics have been using apartheid since the 1990s to
describe Israel, several international human rights groups, including Israeli groups, as well as UN investigators,
have since also proscribed Israeli policies of dispossession,
discrimination and political repression as befitting the label, too.
The erasure of these dimensions from a centre that seeks to use the
Holocaust as an entry point to discuss genocide and crimes against
humanity, activists say, is a stunning eschewal of institutional
responsibility and stimulates unease over the centre's purpose as a
front for Israeli policy.
The permanent exhibit showcases scenes and aerial shots of several concentration camps housing European Jews (MEE/Azad Essa)
![The Cape Town Genocide and Holocaust Centre showcases how Jews resisted Nazi rule during the Holocaust (MEE/Azad Essa)]()
The Cape Town Genocide and Holocaust Centre showcases how Jews resisted Nazi rule during the Holocaust (MEE/Azad Essa)
Responding
to the centre's position that it was awaiting a tribunal to declare the
situation in Gaza a genocide before it would do so, Chikte said that
the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had already described Israel's
actions as amounting to "plausible" genocide - an action itself that
triggers a series of obligations for states and corporations around the
world.
According to Chikte, the centre ought to be helping articulate a plan
of action, even spearheading calls for accountability, but was instead
succumbing to Israeli tactics of "whataboutery" as a means to justify
inaction.
"Selective remembrance reeks of hypocrisy and signals complicity. In
such hands, 'Never Again' is stripped of its universal meaning and
turned into a sectarian slogan," Chikte said.
He added that as a centre dedicated to employing examples of the past
to educate, the act of omission was really an effort to turn Holocaust
memory into political cover for Israeli state violence.
Likewise, a spokesperson for the South African chapter of Healthcare
Workers for Palestine (HCW4P-SA), told MEE that they merely wanted the
centre to fulfil its own stated aims.
The centre's website states that participants in its workshops "reflect on human rights abuses that are happening today".
Bluen, the scholar on genocide, said the centre's deflection to a
tribunal's final judgement made for an easy escape to assume
responsibility.
"This is, quite frankly, a moderately sophisticated way of justifying
one's committed status as an accomplice to genocide," Bluen said.
"It is also another form of participation in the ongoing Nakba, which
constituted not only fragmentation, land dispossession and genocidal
ethnic cleansing, but also the erasure of Palestinian memory.
"Perhaps the board of CTHGC will be able to hear the declaration of
genocide at an international tribunal from the dock, where it belongs.
Perhaps then it will change its approach," Bluen added.
'An accomplice to genocide'
The Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre was built in 1999 and was
the first of its kind on the African continent. It was initially called
the Cape Town Holocaust Centre, but in 2018, 'Genocide' was added to
expand the agenda of the centre.
In 2019, it was providing material for school curricula, had trained more than 5,000 teachers and was contributing to police, navy and prison services programmes.
Drawing in more than 25,000 visitors annually, in 2020, the centre was awarded
the Traveller's Choice Award by TripAdvisor for being in the top 10
percent of attractions worldwide, underlining its popularity as a
tourism destination.
It also received a ministerial award for 'Outstanding Contribution to
Promoting Social Inclusion' at the 18th Annual Western Cape Cultural
Affairs Awards.
Learners from schools visit the The Cape Town Genocide and Holocaust Centre (MEE/Azad Essa)
An image showing conditions inside a concentration camp
in Buchenwald as displayed at the Cape Town Genocide and Holocaust
Centre (MEE/Azad Essa)
As narrated by Cynthia Kros,
from the University of Cape Town, the permanent exhibition "is designed
according to the metaphor of 'the road to genocide', taking visitors
from the age-old origins and persistence of racism and antisemitism
through the horrors of the Nazi regime, its expansion in Europe,
developments culminating in the attempt to implement the 'Final
Solution', and on to liberation, the Nuremberg trials, and survivor
testimony."
The exhibit is not just immersive, it's filled with photos, reminders and fragments of people's lives along the way.
These include examples of racist laws and sections on how
documentation was used as a form of resistance, the armed resistance
against the Nazis and the efforts of German allies who tried to speak
out.
"Not to act is to act. Not to speak is to speak," a quote attributed
to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German who was executed for trying to rescue
Jews, is highlighted in a section about the White Rose resistance
movement.
The Cape Town Genocide and Holocaust Centre (MEE/Azad Essa)
The Cape Town Genocide and Holocaust Centre (MEE/Azad Essa)
Despite
the centre providing a vast body of work on the Holocaust and other
genocides, scholars and activists told MEE that its close proximity to
the state of Israel, through partnerships or collaborations, or through
its trustees, was alarming.
The centre's annual reports are replete with examples of events, visits, and collaborations with the Israeli embassy.
Several of the centre's trustees include high-profile pro-Israel
supporters, including Philip Krawitz, who was recognised in 2015 by
Israeli fundraising organisation Keren Hayesod for his fundraising
efforts for Israel during the 2014 war on Gaza.
According to reports in the South African Jewish Report, Cape Town
raised the most amount of funds per capita for Israel during the 2014
war that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians and injured 10,000 others.
The disconnect between the purported aims of the centre and its
exhibits has not gone unnoticed. The head of history at one school told The
Times of Israel in 2019 that her learners end the tours at the centre
with many unanswered questions, "particularly regarding issues between
Israel and the Palestinians, and the way people were treated during the
Holocaust and how they treat others today."
"That is never addressed by people who speak at the centre - it's a hole that needs to be filled," the teacher said.
"In our debrief afterwards, we often bring that in, otherwise, we feel
it is a very one-sided view that we give them," they added.
For Bluen, this erasure is deliberate and amounts to a form of acquiescence to the Israeli narrative.
"If Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre chooses to remain silent on the most live-streamed genocide of our time, and its untold barbaric annihilatory violence, it has chosen the side of genocide."