A communitywide Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration will be held at Holocaust Museum LA in Pan Pacific Park Sunday, marking the 80th anniversary of the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.
The commemoration is set to begin at 11 a.m. and will include remarks by 96-year-old Holocaust survivor Mary Bauer, who spent her childhood in Budapest, Hungary, survived Auschwitz, a death march and Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Holocaust survivor Henry Slucki will lead the singing of “The Partisan Song,” a Yiddish anthem for Holocaust survivors inspired by the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Other scheduled speakers include Mayor Karen Bass, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky, Priscilla Schneider, a daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and Amy Conroy, a granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor.
The commemoration coincides with Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Under a 1953 law passed by the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, Yom HaShoah is observed annually on the 27th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar, which begins at sundown on Sunday and ends at sundown on Monday.
A Yom HaShoah commemoration program will be held at 7 p.m. Monday at the Museum of Tolerance, featuring a preview screening of the film, “The World Will Tremble,” about how a group of prisoners attempt a seemingly impossible escape from the first Nazi death camp in order to provide the first eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust.
A question-and-answer session with director Lior Geller and star Charlie MacGechan will follow.
President Joe Biden issued a proclamation on Friday declaring Sunday through May 12 as the “Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust,” and called “upon the people of the United States to observe this week and pause to remember victims and survivors of the Holocaust.”
“As United States senator, as vice president, and now as president, I have met with many Holocaust survivors, promising them that our nation would neither forget what they endured nor ever again stand by silently in the face of antisemitism,” Biden said in the proclamation.
“The charge has never been more urgent than in the aftermath of Hamas’ vicious terrorist attack on October 7th — the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Among the 1,200 innocent people who were slaughtered and the hundreds taken hostage were elderly survivors of the Shoah, who were forced to relive the horrors they thought they had escaped decades ago.
“My administration is working tirelessly to free the hostages who have been held by Hamas for over half a year — and as I have said to their families, we will not rest until we bring them home.”
Biden also noted the “alarming surge in antisemitism at home and abroad that resurfaces painful scars of millennia, of antisemitism and hate against the Jewish people,” including “harassment and calls for violence against Jews — in our schools, in our communities and online.”
“This blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous,” Biden said. “Antisemitic hate speech has absolutely no place on college campuses or anywhere else in our country. As Americans, we cannot stay silent as Jews are attacked, harassed, and targeted.
“We must also forcefully push back attempts to ignore, deny, distort, or revise the history of Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust or Hamas’ murders and other atrocities committed on October 7th — including the appalling and unforgivable use of rape and sexual assault to terrorize and torture Jewish women and girls.”