Entitled "People, Book, Land: The 3500 Year Relationship of the Jewish People with the Holy Land," the exhibition presents an overview of Jewish life in the Middle East from Biblical times to the present through some 30 illustrated panels and texts. It was co-organized by UNESCO and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, and sponsored by the Permanent Delegations to UNESCO of Canada, Israel, Montenegro and the United States of America. The exhibition was displayed from June 11-20.

"UNESCO is the first United Nations agency to organise an exhibition on the relationship between the Jewish people and the Holy Land, reaffirming the Organization’s role as a universal platform for intellectual cooperation and intercultural dialogue," said UNESCO Director-General Bokova at the opening event.

She continued (excerpts):

"This exhibition is the result of long collaboration with eminent experts. It is an invitation to discover the history of the Jewish people on the Holy Land of the three monotheistic religions, Land of all “the sons of Abraham” in the words of Yitzhak Rabin, a mosaic of cultures and peoples, whose history has shaped the history of all humanity.

Jewish culture has given to the world some of its most universal figures, as you can see on these panels - from Abraham to Einstein, from David to Spinoza, it has contributed to the advancement of all humanity and to the dialogue among cultures, in a continual process of mutual enrichment...

This idea resonates with the core values of UNESCO, founded on the conviction that mutual understanding and the moral solidarity of peoples are the only sustainable answer to racism and anti-Semitism.

This is why UNESCO advances the teaching of history, the sharing of knowledge, and the promotion of all cultures, including Jewish culture.

I refer here to the safeguarding of the millennial sites of Masada and Beersheba, as well as to the modern architecture of Tel Aviv - tributes to Jewish history, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, which is a unique tool of international cooperation. I refer to our cooperation with youth NGOs like YaLa, or with Israeli artists like Ruti Sela and Mayaan Amir, who received a UNESCO peace award...

I am thinking also of Israeli know-how in water management and irrigation, which UNESCO shares with other Member States, and of the talent of scientists like Ada Yonath, UNESCO/L’Oreal Laureate and Nobel Prize Winner, who is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board created by UNESCO.

I am thinking of the fellowships co-sponsored by UNESCO/MASHAV, of our cooperation for gender equality with the Golda Meir Mount Carmel Centre and also with the Weizmann Institute of Science, and of UNESCO’s SESAME scientific project in the Middle East - these are just a few examples of the influence of Israeli expertise and of Jewish culture within and throughout UNESCO.

We work to harness this cooperation as a tool for dialogue and peace, and this helps us also to better understand the challenges facing the Jewish community today - we are well aware of these challenges, and UNESCO stands resolutely by your side to tackle them.

I say this with special emotion after the attack against the Jewish museum in Brussels, where four people were killed and which attacked an institution dedicated to Jewish history in Belgium - this coming two years after the murder of Jewish children in Toulouse.

I am concerned by the rise of anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe, by violence against men, women, children, who are attacked and killed because they are Jewish. I am concerned because these acts of violence are not isolated, they are not the work of ‘solitary wolves’ - they draw on a social climate and discourse that endorses racism as normal along with hatred towards Jews...

We categorically condemn and reject all hate speech. We do so through human rights education, and especially our global programme on Holocaust education, which is unique within the United Nations, and which provides means to prevent violence and to combat Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism today.

Our role is also to identify and to denounce anti-Semitism in all of its forms, including contemporary ones, even the most insidious, because hatred towards Jews can take many guises - economic, racial, social, religious and others - which must be identified and combated..."