International Holocaust Remembrance Day has been observed on Jan. 27 by the United Nations for the past two decades to remind future generations of the largest recorded genocide in history.
In 2005, the United Nations passed a resolution to require its members to honor over 6 million Holocaust victims, including Jewish people and members of other minority groups, according to a webpage from the National WWII Museum of New Orleans.
Victoria Harrison, a Jewish Studies coordinator at San José State who has worked in the department for nearly 20 years, said Jan. 27 was chosen to commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Auschwitz was one of the Nazis’ most notorious concentration camps, according to a webpage from the Memorial and Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was built by the Germans in 1940 to imprison Polish residents after mass arrests.
“It’s interesting that this day was chosen because it was actually the Soviet Red Army who marched in to liberate the people, mostly Jews, imprisoned in the death camp on that day,” Harrison said.
On Jan. 27, 1945, the former Soviet Union’s Red Army marched through the snow into the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and liberated its prisoners from Nazi totalitarianism, according to another webpage from the same source.
It has been 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, according to a Monday article from CNN.
An estimated 1.1 million people were killed in less than five years at the Auschwitz concentration camp, according to another webpage from the Memorial and Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
Jeff Rosen, the district attorney for Santa Clara County, spoke at a press conference at San José City Hall on Monday.
“It's a very sad day. I mean, every day, I think about the Holocaust cause every day I think about my family,” Rosen said. “I think that particularly in the last year and a half since Oct. 7, there's just been an explosion of anti-Semitism and it saddens me. It angers me, but we have no choice but to fight it and try to save our country.”
A historic spike of anti-Jewish threats has been recorded since Oct. 7, 2023, according to preliminary data released by the Anti-Defamation League on Oct. 6, 2024.
Around 3,000 of those incidents took place during what the Anti-Defamation League called “anti-Israel” rallies.
“There's a lot of different ways for young people to learn about the Holocaust, whether it's classes in university, whether it's museums or whether it's trips,” Rosen said. “But I think what has to come first, even before any education, is a willingness to learn things.”
Harrison said in April, the Jewish Studies Department will host a talk from Steven Zipperstein, who will speak with SJSU's Greg Tomlinson about a pogrom in Russia that was instrumental in creating the early 20th-century diaspora of Jews from Russia.
Eighty years after the Holocaust, around 245,000 Jewish survivors remain across 90 countries, according to a Jan. 22 AP News article.
Iris Bendahan founded the California Holocaust Awareness and Action Interactive Museum, a mobile museum that provides educational resources on Jewish history and the Holocaust. “There are programs through Jewish Family Services or the Jewish Silicon Valley,” Bendahan said. “The Anti-Defamation League has a lot of information out there and you can get booklets about it.”
The California Holocaust Awareness and Action Interactive Museum has short-term and long-term installation locations that take the viewer on a journey through Holocaust artifacts, videos, slideshows, stories and artwork, according to a webpage from the museum.
“Film and art often speak most powerfully,” Harrison said. “Memoirs and fiction speak from the emotions of the creator straight through to the emotions of the receiver.”
