On Tuesday, the U.S. officially marks Holocaust Remembrance Day to memorialize the six million Jews murdered by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, and to celebrate those who survived the persecution.
The day is part of a week-long national Days of Remembrance commemoration established by Congress that began on Sunday. This year’s events come as anti-Semitic incidents continue to rise in the U.S. and as the genocide becomes ever more distant for young Americans.
This year’s national ceremony, organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., will be held Thursday at the U.S. Capitol. The commemoration will mark the first time the event will be held at the Capitol since before the pandemic.
“As we lead the nation in remembering the six million Jews who were murdered, honoring the survivors, paying tribute to the rescuers and celebrating the liberators, we are reminded of the power of their history to inspire people everywhere to confront antisemitism, all forms of group-targeted hate and genocide,” the museum said on its website.
Why do we mark Holocaust Remembrance Day?
In addition to Thursday’s event at the Capitol, organizations such as Seattle’s Henry Friedman Holocaust Center for Humanity and the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas have events scheduled throughout the week, with Holocaust survivors sharing their stories and candle-lighting ceremonies to remember the victims.
Two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population was systematically eliminated by Hitler’s Nazi Germany, along with others deemed politically, racially or socially unfit.
But while the genocide was engineered by the Nazis, it’s important to remember it was further enabled by “people who follow orders without question, bystanders who watch and do nothing, ordinary men and women simply going with the flow,” said Chris Leighton of the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies in “Why We Remember,” an informational video posted on the museum’s website.
Why is Holocaust Remembrance Day held this week?
Globally, the day is commemorated on Jan. 27, the date designated by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005 to commemorate the day in 1945 that the Red Army liberated the concentration camp in Auschwitz.
Nations around the world also hold their own commemorations, some also on Jan. 27 and others on other dates. In the U.S., the commemoration aligns with Israel’s Yom Hashoah, a solemn national holiday generally marked on the 27th day of Nisan, the first month of the ecclesiastical year.
The date also roughly coincides with the April 19 anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which 700 Jewish insurgents resisted German troops and police who had swarmed the largest Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Europe to deport Jewish inhabitants. The revolt, the first major urban rebellion against the Nazi occupation, was crushed four weeks later.
Why is the occasion important?
Such commemorations are playing against a backdrop of rising antisemitism around the world. According to the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. rose to an all-time high of 3,697 in 2022, an increase of 36% over the previous year.
Survey results released in 2018 showed nearly a third of Americans and more than four in 10 Millennials mistakenly thought two million or fewer Jewish people died during the Holocaust — and while more than half of the six million Jews killed were from Poland, where the Auschwitz concentration camp was located, two-thirds of Millennials and 41% of Americans overall were unable to identify it.