The Embassy of Israel and United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) organized the UN International Holocaust Memorial Day on Wednesday January 27, 2016 at UNCC, United Nations Building.
On January 27 each year, the United Nations (UN) commemorates the Holocaust. One of the darkest times in human history when six million Jews and five million others were subjected to systematic killings aiming for a Genocide of the Jewish People and others.
This year theme is “The Holocaust and Human Dignity”.
70 years after the Holocaust, we witness new forms of hatred, racism, brutality and horrors in several parts of the world. This makes it all the more important that the lessons of the past should be remembered so that similar evils will never be repeated.
The ceremony included the following:
Six candles lighting by
- H.E. Mr. Simon Roded, the Ambassador of Israel to Thailand
- Ms. Laura Lopez, Officer-in-Charge, a.i. UNESCAP, who delivered message from Mr. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations
- H.E. Dr. Teerakiat Jareonsettasin (M.D.), Deputy Minister of Education
- H.E. Mr. Peter Prügel, Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany
- Mr. Socheat Nhean, Director of Media Center at the Sleuk Rith Institute, the Kingdom of Cambodia
- Mr. Chihiro Sugihara, the grandson of Mr. Chiune Sugihara
Mr. Chiune Sugihara was the Japanese Vice-Consul in Kaunas, Lithuania from 1939 to 1940. He risked his career, future and family’s lives to save the lives of more than 6,000 Jews by issuing transit visas for refugees so that they could leave the county. He was still hand writing visas and stamping passports even at the railway station, as he was leaving Lithuania. His selfless act resulted in the second largest number of Jews rescued from the Nazis. In 1984 Mr. Chiune Sugihara was granted Israel`s highest honor. He was one of only two Asians awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Israel. As of today it is estimated that more than 80,000 descendants owe their existence to Sugihara.
The Holocaust exhibition "The Courage to Remember" of the Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles.
This traveling exhibition comprises information and rare photos before and during the Holocaust until the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The exhibition ties together the past to the present teaching the dangerous and destructive impact of ignorance, hatred and intolerance on individuals, communities and nations.
Screening “Anne Frank” VDO
During the Holocaust, a German-Jewish teenager was forced together with the family members to go into hiding for two years in concealed rooms behind a bookcase above her father’s office in Amsterdam. In 1944, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps. Anne was eventually transferred to the Bergen-Belsen where she died of typhus in February or March of 1945 just weeks before the camp was liberated in April.
Her diary "The Diary of a Young Girl" documented her life in hiding under the Nazi occupation. Since it was first published in 1947, Anne Frank's Diary has become one of the most powerful memoirs of the Holocaust. In 1999, Time Magazine named her, among the heroes and icons, “The Most Important People of the 20th Century”. She lent a searing voice to the fight for human dignity.