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.
In a 2018 message on the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, President Donald Trump said, “Every generation must learn and apply the lessons of the Holocaust to prevent new horrors against humanity from occurring.
“As I have said: `We will stamp out prejudice. We will condemn hatred. We will bear witness, and we will act.’ In this spirit, we must join together across our nations and with people of goodwill around the world to eliminate prejudice and promote more just societies. We must remain vigilant to protect the fundamental rights and inherent dignity of every human being.”