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Quotes

Israeli Ambassador Daniel Taub on Holocaust Memorial Day

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“Israel remains home to hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors, and many of our institutions and communities were built by arms bearing tattooed numbers. As our extraordinary founders now reach old age, we have a profound responsibility both to ensure that they receive the care they need, and to redouble our efforts to learn as much as we can of their stories. As the great writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel emphasises, “when you listen to a witness, you become a witness.”

Israel formally commemorates the Holocaust on Yom Hashoah, three months after International Holocaust Memorial Day. Whereas the latter marks the day that Auschwitz was liberated, the former pays tribute to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: perhaps the greatest display of Jewish resistance against the Nazis. Yet while the Holocaust will always carry particular national significance for Jews, the birth of the State of Israel so soon after the Holocaust was never about isolating the Jewish people from the international community, but rather becoming part of it. In remembering how our nation was so nearly erased, we are reminded of what we – as a nation among equals – can now achieve.” (Israeli Ambassador Daniel Taub in the Daily Telegraph ‘Auschwitz 70th anniversary: Even today, Jews need Israel as a safe haven’, 28/01/2015)