Each year, Americans observe Holocaust Remembrance Day, known as Yom HaShoah in Hebrew, with activities and events that honor and remember the victims of the Holocaust and the Jewish resistance to the Nazis and their collaborators.
This year Holocaust Remembrance Day falls on May 1, which corresponds to the 27th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar.
To coincide with Yom HaShoah, the United States in 1979 established the Days of Remembrance as an annual eight-day period for local governments, schools, organizations and workplaces to host remembrance activities and events for their communities to pay tribute to those who perished during the Holocaust.
The U.S. Department of State was partner with the Embassy of Belarus to host a reception and program to commemorate the Minsk Ghetto, including remarks by a survivor, Saveliy Kaplinsky. When Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, they confined the 80,000 Jews who lived in the city of Minsk to a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers and began to murder them. Between November 1941 and October 1942, the Nazis sent to Minsk nearly 24,000 Jews from Germany and central Europe. The Nazis and police authorities shot or gassed — in special gas vans — many of them upon arrival. Others were deported to death camps when the ghetto was liquidated in November 1943. Only a handful of the 104,000 survived.
Mary Jane Maxwell, ShareAmerica
