With the active support of members of the Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies (HfJS) and their circle of friends, the ArabsAsk project members founded the Post7October e. V. association at the university on 18 January 2024.
The terrorist attacks by Hamas in Israel also disrupted the lives of some students in Heidelberg. Although they were and are all affected in different ways, three HfJS students agreed on one thing: we have to do something. The idea of ArabsAsk matured and has now been realised through the founding of the associated sponsoring association Post7October e. V..
What ArabsAsk is all about is quickly explained: Rawan Osman, a Syrian-Lebanese student at the Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies, who has already been working as a peace activist for several years, creates educational short videos for TikTok and Instagram that are dedicated to individual aspects of controversial topics, such as the Middle East conflict, Muslim anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories and anti-Islamic racism. She presents these in front of the camera in Arabic. She will be supported by David Lüllemann, Master's student at the HfJS, who has many years of experience in training courses to raise awareness of anti-Semitism, and Lukas Stadler, historian and Judaist at the HfJS, who has already written a brochure against anti-Semitism for the Jewish community in Graz.
"Arabs:inside ask" is the name of the project - and receive answers in Arabic. Because that's what it's all about: low-threshold information that is academically sound and appealing. In addition, the description of the videos provides references to academic literature in Arabic, German and English.
The project team hopes that this will also have a participatory effect among Arabic-speaking people in Germany who have so far remained silent.
With the founding of the association, which was actively supported by members of the university as well as the university's circle of friends, the next step has now been taken to put the project on a solid footing. According to its statutes, the purpose of the association is "the promotion of education, popular and vocational training, the promotion of international sentiment, tolerance in all areas of culture and the idea of international understanding, and the promotion of the memory of victims of persecution, war and disasters".
The programme includes educational videos as well as participation in events to strengthen German-European-Israeli and Jewish-Muslim-Christian relations.
The financial support from the state government's anti-Semitism commissioner emphasises the importance of the association and should serve as an incentive for other donors, hope the protagonists. However, there is little time for advertising at the moment: more videos are in the pipeline and an official website is also under construction - encouraging prospects for all interested parties beyond social media.
