It has been over 60 years since the Holocaust and on Yom Hashoah we remember the 6 million Jews who were systematically murdered simply for being Jewish. This year, the Yom Hashoah will be on May 1, 2008. Excerpted from JewishVirtualLibrary: The full name of the day commemorating the victims of the Holocaust is “Yom Hashoah Ve-Hagevurah”— literally the “Day of (remembrance of) the Holocaust and the Heroism.” It is marked on the 27th day in the month of Nisan — a week after the seventh day of Passover, and a week before Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen
Read More +From 130,000 Images Online in Yad Vashem Photo Archives: Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, has made available online 130,000 images from its photo archives. The images include photographs taken in the ghettos, during the deportations, images that illustrate slave labor, the camps, liberation and more. “We are hoping that the public will join us in our ongoing efforts to decipher the pictures and identify the people in them,” said Dr. Haim Gertner, Director of the Yad Vashem Archives.
Read More +Yad Vashem chose six Holocaust survivors to light a torch at the state ceremony of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) on Wednesday night. They are Menachem Katz, Noemi Shadmi, Zvi Unger, Esther Samuel-Cahn, Michael Maor, and Meir Brand. Click here to read their stories.
Read More +It is still our father’s Europe. From EJP: Speaking at a special commemoration organized Monday evening in the European Parliament ‘s Yehudi Menuhin Hall on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Kantor said: “There are more neo-Nazis than Jews today in Europe.” Kantor, who lost half of his family in the Shoah or Holocaust in Ukraine, deplored the “trivialization” of the neo-Nazi phenomenon and warned that “lessons of history have not been learned.” “We should not allow things to be repeated,” he added, in the presence of the president of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Poettering. Poettering, who is a
Read More +From The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants: The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants is the umbrella organization of survivor groups and landsmanshaften located in North America that was founded in 1981. The mission of the organization is remembrance, education and commemoration. Immediately after the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Israel in June, 1981, the organizers of that event established a non-profit corporation to prepare for the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Washington, DC in April, 1983. The officers of this “event-geared” organization were Benjamin Meed, Sam Bloch, Ernest
Read More +The Survivors of the Holocaust Are Dwindling – Will the Memories Last Beyond Them?
Read More +From JTA: Bulgarians paid tribute to the 64th anniversary of the rescue ofthe country’s Jewish population from the Nazis. Bulgarians laid flowers Thursday at the memorial plaques near Saint Sofia Cathedral in honor of those who supported the Jews. Parliamentary Chief Georgi Pirinski laid flowers at a plaque near the National Assembly in Sofia, recalling the valor of parliamentarians during World War II who stood up for Jews. Although aligned with Germany during World War II, Bulgaria refused the Nazi order to deport any of its 50,000 Jews to death camps thanks to the efforts of the government, the Orthodox
Read More +This is one of those e-mails that is impossible NOT to forward.———————————————————–REMEMBRANCE AND HOPE———————————————————–The following are excerpts of a speech that Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel gave last week at the Holland and Knight Charitable Foundation’s Holocaust Remembrance Project dinner at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington: Why remember? … Why should we give our memories to young people and place such a burden of sadness on their frail or not so frail shoulders? … What we want to give is reasons to be joyous. “Have fun,” as you say in America. I don’t like that expression. There are two
Read More +