The General Assembly designated 27 January as an annual International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, because on that day in 1945 the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz, the concentration camp located in Nazi-occupied Poland, which had become a symbol of the Holocaust. ![]() This, however, changed in November 2005 when the United Nations General Assembly, propelled by the initiative of Israeli UN delegate Silvan Shalom, adopted a resolution that International Holocaust Remembrance Day will be marked annually on 27 January and that “The Holocaust, which resulted in the destruction of one-third of the Jewish people, will forever be a warning to all of the world’s nations against the dangers of unjustified hatred, racism and prejudice.” ![]() The day was marked by a two-minute siren, during which people stood silently to commemorate the murder of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators, and memorial ceremonies throughout the country.īut what about elsewhere? For years, the only commemoration ceremonies that existed throughout Europe and other countries involved in the Second World War were those commemorating a particular country’s soldiers fallen in battle, or civilians killed in the war. From 1959 onwards, Yom Hashoah-Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel-was set on the 27 th of the Hebrew month of Nissan, taking place in the spring, near the date of the 1943 Jewish uprising against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 added a new dimension to Holocaust commemoration, with national commemoration of the Holocaust of European Jewry being set already in the early 1950s. How can you commemorate an atrocity with which so much of the local population had been identified only a short time before? There, too, Holocaust commemoration arose from a meeting of cultures and a struggle over cultural primacy between Germany’s past and present. Holocaust commemoration in Germany was particularly difficult for many years. In a few countries, the Holocaust was commemorated nationally in others, locally and in most, not at all. The Holocaust has been commemorated since the end of the Second World War (1939-1945). ![]() The Holocaust was a systematic process that took place in Europe between 19, where the Nazis and their collaborators, under German chancellor Adolf Hitler, first persecuted and then tried to annihilate the Jewish inhabitants of all countries under their domination based on their interpretation of a pseudo-scientific racial theory. This is certainly true with regards to Holocaust remembrance commemoration. Commemoration and remembrance fill several needs simultaneously, creating a source of unification and continuity, acting as a tool to develop an ethos to be passed down to future generations, and integrating patterns of belief to provide a building block in the healing process. Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, Director of the Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University in IsraelĬommemoration and remembrance-“to honor and preserve the memory of something for all eternity”-is an ancient concept whereby people in the present leave a concrete reminder of prior events for the coming generations, creating a bridge between the past and the future.
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