Germany is preparing to place Jewish religious textbooks in classrooms for the first time since the Holocaust, a step education officials and Jewish leaders are framing as both a historic milestone and a direct response to a troubling rise in antisemitism across the country’s schools.

The eight-volume series, written in German for students between the ages of 10 and 16, will walk young readers through the Torah, the Tanach, Jewish prayer, ethics and religious law, the holiday calendar, life-cycle traditions, and the broader arc of Jewish history. The first volume, centered on the Torah, arrives in classrooms as the new school year begins, with the remaining seven titles scheduled to follow one per year.

The project, called Da’at Hadorot — Hebrew for “Knowledge of the Generations” — was produced by the Central Council of Jews in Germany together with Ernst Klett Verlag, one of the country’s major educational publishers. Organizers say the books were written for Jewish and non-Jewish students alike, with the goal of widening general understanding of Jewish faith and tradition at a time when Jewish communities in Germany are reporting increased hostility.

“On equal footing with Christian religious subjects.” Josef Schuster, President, Central Council of Jews in Germany

Josef Schuster, who leads the Central Council, called the release a landmark for Jewish life in Germany, noting that Jewish religious education has, for decades, lacked the kind of dedicated, curriculum-matched materials that Christian religious instruction has long had. Teachers had instead pieced lessons together from translated elementary worksheets, a single upper-secondary ethics textbook, and materials they built themselves.

The new volumes are designed to sit inside Germany’s existing official curriculum for Jewish religious instruction rather than replace it, giving schools a ready-made set of texts and teaching tools organized by what students are expected to learn at each stage. They will be distributed to Jewish schools as well as state schools across all sixteen German federal states where Jewish religious education is offered.

Shila Erlbaum, who heads the Central Council’s Politics and Religion Department and helped lead the project, said the goal was a resource that goes beyond text on a page. According to Erlbaum, students working through the series will piece together picture puzzles, follow the life of Moses through a dice-based game, and test their grasp of religious vocabulary by scanning a QR code with their phones. Hebrew terms are used throughout to strengthen students’ connection to Jewish language and identity, paired with translations and transliterations so readers unfamiliar with Hebrew can still follow along.

The books arrive at a tense moment for Jewish life in German schools. Days before the announcement, Felix Klein, the federal government’s commissioner for Jewish life and the fight against antisemitism, called for mandatory antisemitism training to be built into teacher education, arguing that educators need the tools to recognize and respond to anti-Jewish hostility as Jewish students continue to face harassment in the classroom.

“Anyone susceptible to antisemitism has no place in the teaching profession.” Felix Klein, Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life and the Fight Against Antisemitism

Klein has also argued that teachers found expressing antisemitic views in the classroom should face disciplinary action, and that school curricula more broadly should present a fuller picture of Jewish life — one that doesn’t reduce Jewish identity to antisemitism, the Middle East conflict, or the Holocaust alone, but reflects the depth of Jewish history, culture, and everyday life.

Taken together, the textbook rollout and the push for teacher training reflect a broader effort inside Germany to rebuild and safeguard Jewish communal life nearly a century after its near-destruction, even as antisemitic incidents continue to climb in schools nationwide.