NEW YORK, NY.- As tension continues to simmer over the Israel-Hamas war, New York City officials have embraced a privately funded initiative to send all eighth graders in public and charter schools to visit the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

The program, part of a $2.5 million public-private partnership to address antisemitism, will be seeded with $1 million from a foundation run by Jon Gray, president of investment firm Blackstone.

The citywide field trip plan, announced Thursday, will center on the museum’s efforts to educate younger visitors about the Holocaust. The initiative comes as schools grapple with questions about how to approach the Israel-Hamas war and what to teach about the history of the conflict. It will be optional for schools and will start this fall.

In places such as California, there have been pushes for teaching pro-Palestinian lessons in schools. Leaders in New York City’s school system, which is particularly diverse, with tens of thousands of Jewish, Muslim and Arab students, are moving to offer new curriculum materials about antisemitism and Islamophobia.

New York is one of nearly two dozen states that are required to teach students about the Holocaust, and lawmakers included $500,000 in the state budget this year to review and update Holocaust curricula in schools.

The field trip program was created by Julie Menin, a Jewish City Council member from Manhattan whose mother and grandmother survived the Holocaust in Hungary. She said she was worried about a rise in antisemitic attacks in the city.

“We need a proactive approach to combat this hatred at its roots,” she said.

Menin said that eighth grade was an appropriate time for students to learn about the atrocities of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed. She said visiting the exhibition would make a more lasting impression than reading about it in a textbook.

“We know there are Holocaust deniers,” she said. “When you see this exhibition and you personally witness the stories of survivors, it truly makes a difference.”

The program will be offered to more than 85,000 students in public and charter schools over the next three years. The museum, in lower Manhattan, opened in 1997 and describes itself as a living memorial to the Holocaust.

Shahana Hanif, the first Muslim woman elected to the City Council and who represents a district in Brooklyn, said the program was a good investment and also underscored the need for programming built around Palestinian history.

“There is no Palestinian Cultural Center in New York City, nor an Islamic Heritage Museum,” she said. “These would be great investments for an inclusive education and learning opportunity.”

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in New York, also supported the use of field trips to “help students of today recognize and oppose modern genocides, whether in China, Sudan, Myanmar, Gaza or anywhere else.”

Gray, who is Jewish, has worked with Menin on other programs to offer free swim lessons and college savings accounts to public school students. He and his wife, Mindy, said in a statement that an “alarming rise in antisemitism today must be addressed through better education about our past — both its darkest moments and the incredible displays of courage in response.”

The museum will hire additional staff to run the program and work with schools to schedule tours and to provide free transportation.

The city’s Education Department is also working with the museum to create a new Holocaust teaching guide for educators that will be released in the fall. The schools chancellor, David C. Banks, has said that by June 2025, the system will offer separate curriculum series on the culture and contributions of Jewish and Muslim Americans to society — as part of a social studies initiative that has already offered materials on Asian Americans and LGBTQ+ stories.

Banks, who attended the announcement along with City Council members and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, praised the field trip program.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage is currently offering a new exhibit, “Courage to Act: Rescue in Denmark,” which is designed for 9- to 12-year-olds and explores how ordinary Danes saved 7,200 Jews by smuggling them into Sweden by boat.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.