Washington (CNN) Nearly 150 scholars, many who teach about the Holocaust, urged the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to retract its recent statement rejecting comparisons of the situation at the US southern border to concentration camps.

"The very core of Holocaust education is to alert the public to dangerous developments that facilitate human rights violations and pain and suffering; pointing to similarities across time and space is essential for this task," the open letter reads , according to The New York Review of Books.

"The Museum's decision to completely reject drawing any possible analogies to the Holocaust, or to the events leading up to it, is fundamentally ahistorical," the letter reads.

"It has the potential to inflict severe damage on the Museum's ability to continue its role as a credible, leading global institution dedicated to Holocaust memory, Holocaust education, and research in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies," the scholars write.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York in June accused President Donald Trump's administration of running "concentration camps" in its detention of migrants at the southern border.

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