 Yad Vashem |
The 2012 observance of the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust will focus on the theme "Children and the Holocaust". One-and-a-half million Jewish children perished in the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. Some children managed to survive in hiding, others fled to safe havens before it was too late, while many others suffered medical experiments or were sent to the gas chambers immediately upon arriving at the death camps.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the weekly Cabinet meeting this morning (22 January 2012) reviewed a special exhibition of posters for International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
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The exhibition - "The Holocaust - Keeping the Memory Alive" - is part of an international project to encourage design students from around the world to express their views on the issue of remembering the Holocaust. The exhibition, which will open at the UN building in New York on Thursday, 26 January 2012 (the posters will be on display at the UN, at all 73 UN Information Centers around the world, and in many other locations), is an initiative of the Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies and the Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, and is based on the well-known and successful model - Israel's official poster design competition for Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day.
Yad Vashem Council Chairman Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein, Yad Vashem Directorate Chairman Avner Shalev and Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky attended the meeting, which began with a discussion of the issue.
At the beginning of the meeting, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that, "Seventy years ago, the Jewish people were helpless. It had no ability - neither political, nor military nor diplomatic - to organize its defense, and one-third of our people were annihilated. The difference between 1942 and 2012 is not the absence of enemies, that same desire to destroy the Jewish people and the state that has arisen, this desire exists and has not changed. The difference is our ability to defend ourselves and to do so with determination. The Jewish people and the government of Israel have the obligation and the right to prevent another annihilation of the Jewish people or attack on its state."
