On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it’s worth reflecting on a disturbing pattern: how propaganda has been used to vilify Jews in different eras. The lessons we thought we learned from World War II— about the dangers of hateful narratives—seem to be fading. Today, some of the same tactics used by the Nazis are being deployed by Islamist/ Marxist movements and their supporters to turn public opinion against Israel, with worrying consequences.
A copy Adolf Hitler’s sick autobiography, “Mein Kampf,” was found inside a child’s bedroom at a Hamas base in the
Gaza Strip, Israeli authorities said. The copy of the Nazi leader’s 1925 autobiography outlining his deadly journey into antisemitism and the genocide of millions of Jews and other ethnic minorities during the Holocaust included “annotations and highlights,”
The book was discovered among the personal belongs of one of the terrorists,” the IDF said in the online post. “Hamas embraces the ideology of Hitler, the one responsible for the annihilation of the Jewish People.” -
NY Post 11/12/23
What Happened in Nazi Germany
The Nazis used propaganda to convince Germans that Jews were the root of society’s problems. Newspapers, posters, and films portrayed Jewish people as subhuman and dangerous, blaming them for economic woes and cultural decay. These messages played on centuries-old prejudices in Europe, where anti-Semitic stereotypes had taken root in Christian doctrine and culture. The propaganda worked. Ordinary Germans accepted these lies, enabling the persecution and eventual genocide of six million Jews.
How It’s Happening Again
Fast forward to today, and we see a similar playbook being used by Hamas and its allies, including Qatar. Through modern media and social networks, they spread the message that Israel is an oppressor, responsible for all Palestinian suffering. Casualty figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health—controlled by Hamas—are often inflated or misleading, but they’re repeated by Western media without much scrutiny. Staged events and manipulated images also flood the internet, painting Israel as a brutal aggressor.
Phrases like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or “Free Palestine” have become rallying cries in protests worldwide. But few stop to question the implications—these slogans call for the elimination of Israel. Meanwhile, Israel’s side of the story, including its right to defend itself against rocket attacks and terrorism, is often ignored.
Why It Matters
Just as Nazi propaganda dehumanized Jews to justify their persecution, today’s anti-Israel narratives have made it acceptable to vilify and scapegoat Jewish people once again. In cities across the West, we’ve seen people tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis, vandalizing Jewish schools and synagogues, and chanting slogans that call for Israel’s destruction.
This isn’t just about spreading lies and hatred; it’s about how those lies pave the way for authoritarian tyranny. The Islamo-Marxist scapegoating of the Jewish state echoes Nazi tactics: using propaganda to consolidate power by uniting people against a common enemy. In Nazi Germany, this propaganda enabled National Socialists to dominate Europe, suppress dissent, and commit atrocities not only against Jews but against all who opposed their rule. Today, Hamas and its allies exploit similar methods to justify their authoritarian agendas and silence diverse voices within their societies.
The Bigger Picture
What’s most alarming is how easily the media and the public have bought into this propaganda. On this solemn day of remembrance, we should ask ourselves: Have we really learned the lessons of the Holocaust? The Nazis taught the world that scapegoating Jews isn’t just dangerous for them—it’s a tool for tyranny that harms everyone. If we fail to recognize and challenge these tactics, we risk enabling the rise of new authoritarian movements that use hatred and division to manipulate society under absolute power.
On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it’s worth reflecting on a disturbing pattern: how propaganda has been used to vilify Jews in different eras. The lessons we thought we learned from World War II—about the dangers of hateful narratives—seem to be fading. Today, some of the same tactics used by the Nazis are being deployed by groups like Hamas and their supporters to turn public opinion against Israel, with worrying consequences.
A copy Adolf Hitler’s sick autobiography, “Mein Kampf,” was found inside a child’s bedroom at a Hamas base in the Gaza Strip, Israeli authorities said. The copy of the Nazi leader’s 1925 autobiography outlining his deadly journey into antisemitism and the genocide of millions of Jews and other ethnic minorities during the Holocaust included “annotations and highlights,” The book was discovered among the personal belongs of one of the terrorists,” the IDF said in the online post. “Hamas embraces the ideology of Hitler, the one responsible for the annihilation of the Jewish People.” - NY Post 11/12/23
What Happened in Nazi Germany
The Nazis used propaganda to convince Germans that Jews were the root of society’s problems. Newspapers, posters, and films portrayed Jewish people as subhuman and dangerous, blaming them for economic woes and cultural decay. These messages played on centuries-old prejudices in Europe, where anti-Semitic stereotypes had taken root in Christian doctrine and culture. The propaganda worked. Ordinary Germans accepted these lies, enabling the persecution and eventual genocide of six million Jews.
How It’s Happening Again
Fast forward to today, and we see a similar playbook being used by Hamas and its allies, including Qatar. Through modern media and social networks, they spread the message that Israel is an oppressor, responsible for all Palestinian suffering. Casualty figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health—controlled by Hamas—are often inflated or misleading, but they’re repeated by Western media without much scrutiny. Staged events and manipulated images also flood the internet, painting Israel as a brutal aggressor.
Phrases like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or “Free Palestine” have become rallying cries in protests worldwide. But few stop to question the implications—these slogans call for the elimination of Israel. Meanwhile, Israel’s side of the story, including its right to defend itself against rocket attacks and terrorism, is often ignored.
Why It Matters
Just as Nazi propaganda dehumanized Jews to justify their persecution, today’s anti-Israel narratives have made it acceptable to vilify and scapegoat Jewish people once again. In cities across the West, we’ve seen people tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis, vandalizing Jewish schools and synagogues, and chanting slogans that call for Israel’s destruction.
This isn’t just about spreading lies and hatred; it’s about how those lies pave the way for authoritarian tyranny. The Islamo-Marxist scapegoating of the Jewish state echoes Nazi tactics: using propaganda to consolidate power by uniting people against a common enemy. In Nazi Germany, this propaganda enabled National Socialists to dominate Europe, suppress dissent, and commit atrocities not only against Jews but against all who opposed their rule. Today, Hamas and its allies exploit similar methods to justify their authoritarian agendas and silence diverse voices within their societies.
The Bigger Picture
What’s most alarming is how easily the media and the public have bought into this propaganda. On this solemn day of remembrance, we should ask ourselves: Have we really learned the lessons of the Holocaust? The Nazis taught the world that scapegoating Jews isn’t just dangerous for them—it’s a tool for tyranny that harms everyone. If we fail to recognize and challenge these tactics, we risk enabling the rise of new authoritarian movements that use hatred and division to manipulate society under absolute power.
UK schools are eliminating Holocaust history from curriculum- due to pressure from Muslims and their anti-Zionist, leftist sympathizers. US statistics show shocking ignorance about Holocaust among young people.
Israeli-American Girl Scout, Sivan Barashi, returned from a Scouts' trip to the Auschwitz Museum in Poland with a sense of the scope of the institutionalized genocide which she feels is not being adequately addressed in American schools' history curricula. Why might the subject discriminatorily be de-emphasized by Christians and/or liberals in public (and private) middle and secondary school education?
Nonagenarian, Daniel Szafran, survived the Nazi genocide of European Jewry as a slave laborer. Living in Las Vegas, he met with a small group of Israeli-American Girl Scouts who took an educational trip to the Auschwitz camp - where he was incarcerated. He doesn't feel that Holocaust education is emphasized sufficiently in America or even in Israel.
Mr. Natan Barashy bemoans leftist influence in minimizing history resulting in the Holocaust in educational curricula. He also condemns Democratic Socialists throughout the world buying-into the libel which reverses Israel's defense against Islamist-Imperialist, Iranian-armed, Palestinians as "aggressive" - but supporting the anti-Semitic Muslim world, religiously mandated to annihilate the Jews of the world in a Muslim-led Holocaust against Israel.
Aftermath of World War I and the Rise of Nazism, 1918–1933 (Starts at 00:58)
Building a National Community, 1933–1936 (Starts at 12:22)
From Citizens to Outcasts, 1933–1938 (Starts at 18:12)
World
War II and the Holocaust, 1939–1945 (Starts at 24:34)
Sources and Credits (Starts at 37:25)
"Netanyahu: Allies could have saved 4 million Jews if they’d bombed death camps in 1942" The Times of Israel, 4/24/17
Israeli P.M. Benjamin Netanyahu condemned int'l complacency
to earlier intel of Nazi's mass murdering of Jewish people at Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance ceremony
"In bitter Holocaust Remembrance Day speech citing new UN documents, Israel's PM castigates global indifference 81 years ago, says it persists today.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday launched a blistering assault on Allied policy during World War II, saying world powers’ failure to bomb the Nazi concentration camps from 1942 cost the lives of four million Jews and millions of others. Citing recently released UN documentsthat show the Allies were aware of the scale of the Holocaust in 1942, some two years earlier than previously assumed, Netanyahu said in a speech marking Holocaust Remembrance Day that this new research assumed “a terrible significance.”
Film stills from "What the Allies Knew" by Virginie Linhart,
produced by Fabienne Servan-Schreiber and Cinétévé
“If the powers in 1942 had acted against the death camps — and all that was needed was repeated bombing of the camps — had they acted then, they could have saved 4 million Jews and millions of other people,” he said at the official state ceremony marking the start of the memorial day.
Allied declined to bomb the railways which which transported Jews to the camps daily
“The powers knew, and they did not act,” he told the audience at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.“When terrible crimes were being committed against the Jews, when our brothers and sisters were being sent to the furnaces,” he went on, “the powers knew and did not act.”
In a bleak and bitter address, the Israeli prime minister said that the Holocaust was enabled by three factors: the vast hatred of the Jews, global indifference to the horrors, and “the terrible weakness of our people in the Diaspora.”
Iran's "World without Zionism" (photo: BlazingCatFur)
Anti-Semitism had not disappeared, and “it would be naive to think” that it would do so in the foreseeable future, he said. It was being exacerbated by “hatred from the East,” led by Iran and the Islamic State, he added.
"Bombing Auschwitz" 75th Anniversary Preview: The Great Moral Dilemma of the 20th Century
In May 1944, Rabbi Michael Weissmandl sent the Auschwitz Protocol, along
with a plea for help and a demand for Allied air forces to bomb
Auschwitz, to Roswell McClelland at the War Refugee Board in
Switzerland.
Should the
Allies have risked killing Auschwitz prisoners and bombed the camp to
stop future atrocities? Join historians, survivors and experts as they
consider one of the great moral dilemmas of the 20th century.
D-Day to V-E Day: World War II continued for almost 11 months after the successful Normandy landings in France on June 6, 1944, commonly known as D-Day.
American troops liberating Dachau Concentration Camp
At "The Liberators" documentary screening by the Zachor Foundation, Holocaust survivors, Ben Lesser and Joshua Kaufman discuss their reunions with the Yankee soldiers who liberated them from Dachau Concentration Camp.
Czech Republic's Consul General Pavel Sepelak and Prof. Abraham Sion of Ariel University in Samaria discuss the Allies' mistake of sacrificing Czechoslovakia to delay war with Nazi Germany.
Producer Adam Benzine discusses "Spectres of the Shoah" with Exec Dir. Liebe Geft at at Museum of Tolerance screening
Oscar-nominated (documentary: short-subject) filmmaker, Adam Benzine Adam Benzine takes JooTube inside his producing of "Claude Lansmann: Spectres of The Shoah." The film is nominated for an Academy Award (Category: documentary (short-subject) and in addition to cinema, it has been broadcast by BBC and will be shown in the US on HBO.
French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann reflects on the difficulty of editing and structuring his behemoth Holocaust film SHOAH, in this second clip from Adam Benzine's Oscar®-nominated short subject documentary CLAUDE LANZMANN: SPECTRES OF THE SHOAH.
Oscar-docupix, "Specters of the Shoah" director Adam Benzine at Wiesenthal http://JooTube.TV Before an audience on Int'l Holocaust Remembrance Day 2016, documentarian, Adam Benzine, in conversation with Liebe Geft (director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles) on the making of "Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah." FILM and GUEST BIO: In 1973, French journalist Claude Lanzmann began work on "SHOAH," a film that would forever change his life. Twelve years later, having tracked down former SS officers, dozens of death camp survivors, and having shot more than 200 hours of footage, he finally completed his nearly 10-hour-long documentary masterpiece. In CLAUDE LANZMANN: SPECTRES OF THE SHOAH, the maverick filmmaker recounts the trials and tribulations he faced while creating his Holocaust magnum opus, as well as the weight it left him carrying. Adam Benzine is an English writer, director and journalist based in Toronto. Currently serving as the Canadian Bureau Chief for Uk-based entertainment trade publisher C21 Media, he is the former Associate Editor and Online Editor for Realscreen, the international publisher of non-fiction film and television industry news and content. He has written for a range of publications including The Globe and Mail, The Independent, Indiewire and Little White Lies. "Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah," is his directorial debut. Why Mr. Denis Bieber is upset that the Jewish establishment is weak its responsibility to educating society about the past and potential future Holocaust. At the Holocaust Remembrance Day screening of "Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah" at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
Exploring the roots and joint ideologies of the Nazis and early Arab-Palestinian "National" Movement headed by Jerusalem's religious leader Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini
Confronting anti-Semitism and the Jihadists (courtesy Actual News)
Survivor, Anne Signett recites from the list of Jewish casualties of Fascist Italy
Italy's Consul General to L.A., the Honorable Antonio Verde,leads the reading of names of the Italian Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust at the L.A. Museum of the Holocaust.
Samara Hutman (c) praises Italians Amelie Dembitzer (l) and Anne Signett (r)
Samara Hutman, Executive Director of L.A. Museum of the Holocaust explains the genesis and growth of the Italian Holocaust awareness project.
Mrs. Anne Signett reads the names of Italian victims of Nazism- says it spreading again through the European Left. Mrs. Amelie Dembitzer Levin, who survived the Holocaust by being hidden by Catholics in Belgium.
Hearing the names of some of the 8,000 Jewish family members served-up from Italy sobered the LAMOTH audience.
When Auschwitz and other camps were liberated, the British army sent along a film unit. With the help of supervising director Alfred Hitchcock, the shocking footage was meant for a documentary called German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. However, as the war came to a close, the governments that had once supported exposing German crimes had a new interest in reconciliation and plans for the film were scrapped. 70 years later, a new documentary, Night Will Fall, tells the story of how the footage came to be, and what happened to it. Night Will Fall premieres today on HBO. Watch clips from Alfred Hitchcock's Holocaust Documentary, Night Will Fall, here:
On Holocaust Memorial Week, Jewish leaders from the right and left voice perspectives on the role of Israel in generating anti-Semitism and in averting another Holocaust. Jewish Task Force leader, Chaim ben Pesach, cautions westerners not to repeat tacit complicity in failing to thwart Jew-haters' goals to conquer Israel through an Islamist state of Palestine. At the Holocaust Memorial Park in Brooklyn, New York.
The Jewish Daily "Forward" editor, J.J. Goldberg, shares his views on the role of Jewish and Israeli culpability in the Arab-Israeli conflict in evoking anti-Semitism / anti-Zionism. Recorded at Sinai Temple, Los Angeles.
J.J. Goldberg will present the keynote address at the L.A. Holocaust Museum's annual ceremony on Yom ha Shoah, April 27th, 2014.
On this week's special edition of Stakelbeck on Terror, CBN News sits down with bestselling author and investigative journalist Edwin Black to discuss his new book, The Farhud.
The book outlines the history of Islamic anti-Semitism in the Middle East, including the 1941 organized massacre of Iraqi Jews in Baghdad known as The Farhud, or "violent dispossession."
Watch as Mr. Black breaks down the larger Arab Muslim role in the Nazi Holocaust, which included an active alliance between the leader of the Palestinians and Adolf Hitler, and how this history still affects the Middle East today.
Commemorating the icon of how Europe's Nazi's and Fascists exploited Christian anti-Semitism for their political power.
(ABC Australia Video)
(AP Video)
A remarkable documentary resource exploring the phenomenon of WWII concentration camps, particularly Auschwitz, should be viewed on DaMoosebelly's Channel on YouTube
This BBC-aired video is the sixth and final volume of "Auschwitz- The Nazis and the Final Solution" in a series that examines the Auschwitz death camp from conception to implementation of the "final solution" which resulted in the execution of over 1,100,000 people. This portion gives an overview of the further atrocities suffered at the hands of Soviet "liberators" as well as some people who took justice into their own hands. Also touched on is the appalling failure of the Allies to prosecute some of the worst war criminals...and even help some of them evade prosecution
Atlas Shrugs has an interesting article about the recently discovered Auschwitz blueprints (allegedly hidden by Amin al-Husseini- Hitler's Mufti) and the Mufti's importing Nazi ideology and techniques for demonizing and annihilating of Jews (as a power-technique) into the Muslim world.
Where is the threshold between condemning Israel and affecting Jews?
Assistant Professor in the Practice of International Politics, Columbia University, Lincoln Mitchell, criticizes the progressive blogosphere community's anti-Semitism, cloaked in anti-Israelism - in The Shooting, Anti-Semitism and Blogging, which is published today, June 11, 2009, in the Huntington Post:
You can't have it both ways, expressing righteous indignation when a white supremacist attempts to shoot visitors to the Holocaust Museum, while no longer being startled by the suggestion that the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States as well as millions of hard working, tax paying and voting Americans somehow don't have America's best interest in mind and are disloyal to their country, because of their support for Israel. Nonetheless, these suggestions are made almost daily in the comments section of this website.
The notion that one can be critical of Israeli policy without being anti-Semitic is, of course, true. Many, if not most, American Jews are critical of various aspects of Israeli policy while being far from anti-Semitic. However, the logic of this must end somewhere because too often this truism is interpreted to mean that anti-Israel sentiment can never be anti-Semitic. When it is suggested that Jews are subverting or controlling American foreign policy, putting what is good for Israel ahead of what is good for the US, or hoodwinking good Christians into supporting Israel, the criticism is no longer targeted on Israel. While one can criticize Israel without being an anti-Semite, suggestions of Jewish conspiracies or that Jews are not loyal citizens cannot so easily be made without being anti-Semitic. Historically, these have been at the core of the very definition of anti-Semitism
It is not just criticism of Israel that is the issue here. It is the regularity with which, in these comments and elsewhere, virtually every foreign policy issue is related back to Israel and somehow the Jews are blamed. Some friends and I play a game with foreign policy blogs on the Huffington Post where we try to guess how long it will take before Israel or the Jews are mentioned. Usually this occurs by the tenth comment, regardless of the ostensible topic of the piece in question. This is an obsession that is not healthy and goes beyond simply garden variety criticism of Israel.
Obviously the people making those comments are not going out and trying to kill Jews, but it is both a symptom and a contributing cause of a climate which facilitates, and which will very possibly continue to facilitate, violence of the sort we saw Wednesday.
This is an issue which should be of concern to all of the readers, bloggers, commenters and others who consider ourselves part of the Huffington Post community. We are all guilty of something, possibly hypocrisy, neglect or moral cowardice when we let these comments go unanswered and then loudly condemn acts of violence targeted at Jews. The connection, while not direct, is real. Those of us who call ourselves progressives have a special responsibility to speak out against bigotry in all forms, even when it starts out as being against Israel and seeps into anti-Semitism.
The author of Hitler's Willing Executioners (and son of a Holocaust survivor) Daniel Goldhagen explains how easily self-identifyingly moral people can evolve to tolerate - even commit - genocide. At the Los Angeles Holocaust Day Memorial in April, he relates first-hand interiews with contemporary genociders and genocide victims which he uncovered for his upcoming book, "Worse than War," being released as a PBS documentary in August.
Canada, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France.
Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.
"It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken," Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, "when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack."
Waldron was reviewing "Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment" by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Lewis has been critical of attempts to use the law to limit hate speech.
But even Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections "in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism." In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court's insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.
To commemorate Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day, DemoCast educated the national, home cable TV audience of i-Life TV's Danny Fontana Show to explain Islamism's influence over Nazi ideology and its continuation of Nazi goals and strategies of stimulating anti-Jewish sentiments, then positioning itself as the solution to attain power.
We addressed how the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, inspired the Nazis with Islamic justification against the Jews. He organized and led the Nazi Waffen SS divisions in Yugoslavia. We pointed out how al-Husseini brought Johannes von Leers, Goebbel's favorite Nazi propagandist of annihilation, to convert to Islam, move to Egypt, and imbue the Muslim world (until his death in 1965) to continue the Nazis' annihilationist credo and crusade.
The world now confronts the Islamist continuation of the Fascist quest to global cultural domination - unifying their power and mollifying the West (as did the Nazis) by continuing Hitler's concerted campaign of scapegoating to stimulate anti-Jewish resentment, and empathy for the 'redemptive' Fascists.
Muslim anti-Semitism is growing in scope and extremism, to the point that it has become a credible strategic threat for Israel, according to a 180-page report produced for Israeli policymakers by the semi-official Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) and obtained exclusively by The Jerusalem Post.
According to the report, by educating generations of Muslims with a deep animus toward Israel and Jews, this anti-Semitism, actively promulgated by many states in the region, holds back the peace process and normalization efforts between Israel and Muslim countries. It also forms the intellectual justification for an eliminationist political program.
"This isn't ordinary prejudice," explained ITIC director Col. (res.) Dr. Reuven Erlich, formerly of the IDF's Intelligence Directorate, who heads the team of researchers that produced the report. "This prejudice is evil because it isn't theoretical. It is ideological incitement by states and organizations with the practical means of translating it into action."
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rising anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe was injected into Muslim lands through commercial and diplomatic ties. Spurred by opposition to Zionism and ideologically strengthened by Nazi rhetoric and support, Muslim anti-Semitism grew in the 20th century into a phenomenon so widespread that blatantly anti-Semitic texts can be purchased on street corners of Arab cities, even in countries where almost no Jews remain.
The Syrian government still publishes [writings claiming] that Jews use Christian blood on Passover. You can't say this is anti-Israeli, or caused by the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict."
The report makes clear that the phenomenon of Muslim anti-Semitism is now widespread, popular and expanding.
"The anti-Semitism that fed the Holocaust isn't dead," Erlich says. "It is prospering."
Jews around the world, and particularly in Israel, commemorate the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, as well as those who were able to fight back, beginning Wednesday evening, April 30, through sundown, May 1st.
Yom HaShoah V'Hagvurah, Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day, began Wednesday evening with a public ceremony at Warsaw Ghetto Square in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert spoke, survivors lit six torches, the Chief Rabbis recited prayers, and Cantor Asher Heinowitz sang the El Malei Rachamim prayer.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabriel Ashkenazi, with a delegation of IDF top brass beneath the "Work Will Set You Free" inscription over the gates of the infamous Auschwitz death camp.
The central theme of this year's commemorations is "Choose Life." Last year, it was "Bearing Witness." At 10 PM, a symposium was held on the topic of "Choose Life," with the participation of Holocaust survivors and Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev.
"Israel's Jews are no more the cause of Arab Fundamentalist rage than they were the cause of European Fascism. We, as always, are the miner's canary, singled out as, and the first victims of national or global unrest."
A remarkable, home-made, video-essay memorial to victims of Nazi persecution and Allied liberation. (Courtesy DenLexx via YouTube)
A photo-essay from last year's Yom Ha Shoah, Holocaust Memorial Day from Israel National News.com
IDF Chief of Staff Gabriel Ashkenazi looks at the ovens used to burn Jews in Auschwitz. Ashkenazi's father was a Holocaust survivor; his mother a Jewish refugee from Syria.(Israel news photo: IDF Spokesman)
The Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum launched English and Arabic video channels on Tuesday, just two days before Jews around the world begin their annual commemorations of the Holocaust.
Yad Vashem, the world's largest repository of information on the Holocaust, launched two The Arabic channel has testimonies and archival footage about the Holocaust with Arabic subtitles.
News from Polish Radio World Service Jews and Poles meet for 'March of the Living' 30.04.2008 Listen 3,37 MB The crowd walks between two German Nazi concentration camps, the same way along which camp inmates marched to their death in the gas chambers back in the times of World War Two, continuees Aharon Tamir: 'We march from Auschwitz I as the "March of the Living" contrary to the "march of death" during the Holocaust. We come to Birkenau and over there we have a ceremony. We pray, we speak, we commemorate, we say Kaddish, we speak about the future. That's the idea. What we call this educational project is "From Holocaust to Revival" - from the Shoah to the new future and the new blessings for Israel and the world. We will continue with this as much as we can and we added last year a lot of non-Jews, especially Poles. In this march we will have close to two thousand Polish participants marching with us on the Holocaust Memorial Day.'
Several thousand Jews from all over the world, together with two thousand Poles, will take part in the annual March of the Living on the first of May to commemorate the memory of the victims of Holocaust.
"March of the Living" has been held annually since 1988 by the Israeli Education Ministry and the "March of the Living" organization. It takes place always ten days after the Jewish Pesach or Passover holiday. On this day, Jews all over the world hold prayer vigils commemorating the victims of the German Nazi Holocaust.
'We bring thousands of people, youngsters, adults, mainly Jewish, but there are a lot that are not Jewish, from all over the world - from about fifty five countries. They come to Poland to visit the Holocaust sites, what remains from the large and wonderful Jewish community that was here and perished during the Holocaust. They visit Polish sites, meet Polish youngsters. We believe that we also have to interact with Poland today. And then, after they visit all of Poland, we bring all of them to Auschwitz Birkenau on the Holocaust Memorial Day to march,' said Aharon Tamir, director general of the March of the Living events.