Jewish children from the UK are being invited to take part in a new project to help pupils in Belarus learn about the fate of the Jews in the country during the Second World War.

Around 90 per cent of the Jewish population of Belarus, 800,000 people, were murdered by the Nazis.

But there is “no official Holocaust education programme in Belarus and a lot of Belarusians don’t know about the suffering of Jews,” said Debra Brunner, chief executive of The Together Plan,joint organiser of the scheme with Jewish Child’s Day.

The aim is “to help a shine a light on this lost part of history,” she said.

Over the past seven years The Together Plan has supported Jewish communities in the former Soviet republic to regenerate Jewish life and is also developing the Belarus route for the European Routes of Jewish Heritage .

But its venture with JCD will be aimed mostly at non-Jewish children in a Belarus school.

Some 20-plus year-7 children from the UK will be selected also to participate, digitally meeting up with their Belarusian peers for a number of sessions over the seven months of the programme, which is due to launch on Holocaust Memorial Daya.

The aim is to create a travelling exhibition and each child taking part will be asked to write a short piece reflecting on the significance of what they learned.

Every child will receive a copy of an original archive document, compiled by the Nazis, putting names and faces to just a handful of the 5,000 Jewish children who perished in the Brest ghetto.

Ms Brunner recalled a trip to Belarus with a group of young adults to do research for the Jewish heritage trail. “We had a non-Jewish cameraman with us, a young man who filmed survivors and various places of memory. He was shocked. ‘Why don’t I know this history?’, he said.”