Holocaust survivor Dr. Alex White will be the keynote speaker at Sunday’s 10th annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day Observance on the steps of Palm Springs City Hall.
The observance will begin at 4 p.m. and also include speeches by Palm Springs City Council members Geoff Kors and Lisa Middleton, Rabbi Yankel Kreiman, director of Bikur Cholim of Palm Springs, and Steven Geiger, chair of the Mensch International Foundation.
There will also be a moment of silence for the victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shootings and for local Mensch Foundation supporters who died recently — actresses Carol Channing and Kay Ballard and Cathedral City Mayor Greg Pettis.
White was among the approximately 1,200 Jews whose lives were saved by German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who was immortalized in the 1993 Oscar-winning film “Schindler’s List.”
White’s name was among those on the list of Jews allowed to work at a factory Schindler owned instead of being sent to concentration camps, where they likely would have died.
White is the author of “Be A Mensch: Holocaust Memoirs.”
The event is organized by the Gerald Ford Chapter of Mensch International Foundation. The foundation was founded in 2002 by Steven Geiger, a son of Holocaust survivors, “to develop an educational curriculum to stamp out stereotyping and anti-Semitic and racist thinking.”
The foundation’s goal is “to develop a tolerant social order of values, which respects minority rights and freedom of speech and worship,” Geiger said.
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust was established by a United Nations resolution adopted in 2005 and comes on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by Soviet troops.
“On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we hold in our hearts the memory of every man, woman, and child who was abused, tortured or murdered during the Holocaust,” President Donald Trump said in a message issued Sunday.
“To remember these men and women — those who perished and those who survived — is to strive to prevent such suffering from happening again. Any denial or indifference to the horror of this chapter in the history of humankind diminishes all men and women everywhere and invites repetition of this great evil.
“We remain committed to the post-Holocaust imperative, `Never Again. `Never Again’ means not only remembering — in a profound and lasting way — the evils of the Holocaust, but it also means remembering the individual men and women in this nation, and throughout the world, who have devoted their lives to the preservation and security of the Jewish people and to the betterment of all mankind.”