International Holocaust Remembrance Day (IHRD) held every year on January 27, is a memorial day established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005 to remember and honor victims and families of people who suffered from the German genocide that lasted over a decade.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the day of commemoration was established as an official date to honor victims of the Nazi regime and promote Holocaust education worldwide.
While it may be difficult to imagine unimaginably escaping alive from one of the world’s biggest mass genocides in human history, or getting to hear stories about family members who were the unfortunate victims. For Jewish Americans living in California, that memory is a painful and present reality that they live with, respectfully acknowledging and memorializing it every year.
January 27 is known as Yom HaShoah in Jewish communities. It’s a day when families and communities will often light Yahrzeit candles to honor those who were murdered in the Holocaust. Yahrzeit means anniversary, specifically related to someone’s death
The candle will burn for 24 hours, and it is customary to light it at sundown on the day before Yom HaShoah. Occasionally, electric Yahrzeit candles can be, especially in places like hospitals, for safety reasons.
At the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles, visitors can see artifacts that were formerly personal items from survivors and other memorabilia. The museum was founded in 1961 and is the oldest survivor-founded Holocaust exhibit in the United States that is solely focused on the impact of the Nazi mass genocide.
The experience is free for students, and the museum offers tours, educational programs, and conversations with survivors meant to inspire critical thinking and show the Holocaust’s current social relevance.
A statement from Morgan Blum Schneider, the director of the Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) Holocaust Center reads:
“The JFCS Holocaust Center was founded by Holocaust survivors through perseverance and determination to fight antisemitism. We continue to share their testimony with thousands of students each year.”
“This week, in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day and every week throughout the year, the JFCS Holocaust Center works in partnership with CA teachers to bring lessons of the Holocaust and genocide into classrooms throughout California to inspire social responsibility and moral courage in today’s youth.”
The JFCS Holocaust Center is a program of Jewish Family and Children’s Services of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin, and Sonoma Counties. It houses over 13,000 books and several thousand documents, photographs, and artifacts in the Tauber Holocaust Library and Archives.
The director of California Black Media’s Stop the Hate Project, Brandon Brooks, also lends his voice to the cause;
“For Black Americans, the way we identify with the horror stories of the Holocaust is immediate and deeply sympathetic. It is a recognition based, in part, on our own collective memory of slavery, exclusion and suffering because of who we are – not what we did – as a people.”
“The only way we, Americans from all backgrounds, can begin to do something about the division, misunderstanding and normalization of racial and ethnic hatred that we see trying to flourish in our society is to fight it by learning; push back on it by listening.”
“Get to know about each other’s histories, celebrate each other’s traditions, embrace the things that unite us as Americans and take a hard, uncompromising stance against hatred in any form and the violence it triggers.”
