The World Holocaust Forum (also World Forum “Let My People Live!”) was held for the first time in 2005 in Kraków (Poland) to mark 60 years since the liberation of the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. The First Forum was attended by over 20 official delegations led by their heads of state, among them President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, President of Israel Moshe Katsav, President of Poland Aleksander Kwaśniewski, and Vice President of the United States of America Richard Cheney. The first World Forum received widespread media coverage.
The next fori took place in 2011 at the European Parliament in Brussels on the eve of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day; 2010 in Kraków again; 2015 in Prague and Terezín (better known here as Theresienstadt) used from 1941 to 1945 by Nazi Germany as a walled ghetto, or concentration camp, and as a transit camp for western Jews en route to Auschwitz and other extermination camps.
The Fifth World Holocaust Forum, entitled “Remembering the Holocaust, Fighting Antisemitism” was held on Thursday afternoonJanuary 23, 2020, at Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
Leaders from around the world were participating, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, US Vice President Mike Pence, and French President Emmanuel Macron.
President Reuven Rivlin opened the program, saying the world can unite to fight anti-Semitism and hatred as armies united against the Nazis during World War II as a matter of humanity.
“Anti-Semitism does not stop with Jews – no democracy is immune,”
he said.
Rivlin also emphasized that Israel is not compensation for Holocaust –
“It’s our homeland.”
There was looked at pictures of the 1938 November Pogrom Kristallnacht and the Wannsee Conference of 1942 were plans were made for the Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final Solution to the Jewish Question) which was a primary goal to purify the Arian race.
Though in 1945 after the liberation of the Nazi concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, whose very name symbolizes the barbarism of the killing centres and concentration camps, many could come to hear and see more of the horrific act in the history of mankind, the Western world first reacted with unbelief and abhorrence. But historical lessons were quickly forgotten and as memory faded many also forgot that it is our duty not only to remember, but also to warn when something is going in the wrong direction. And that is what we can see today, 75 years after the liberation of the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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Preceding
75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
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Additional reading
- Is it really true that Anti-Semitism will never be tolerated?
- 2012 mensenrechten rapport – 2012 Human Rights report
- 2014 Human Rights
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- January 27 – 70 years ago Not an end yet to genocide
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- World remembers Auschwitz survivors
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- Jerusalem Ballet paying tribute to Franceska Mann
- Polish commemoration of the liberation of the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau
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- The danger of having less than 25 000 Jews in Belgium
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