Rivlin: Jews cannot remain silent in the face of atrocities

President Reuven Rivlin opens the official ceremony marking Holocaust Remembrance Day saying that, 72 years after the Holocaust, as the number of living survivors dwindles, “so our need to deal with how we relate to the Holocaust and to Holocaust remembrance becomes ever more crucial.”

Rivlin says that Holocaust remembrance and the lessons to be learned from the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people are rooted in three central pillars: self-defense, a shared destiny, and human rights.

“Man is beloved, every man, created in God’s image. This is a sacred obligation that the Jewish people cannot and does not wish to evade. At all times. In every situation. So too, we cannot remain silent in face of the horrors being committed far away from us, and certainly those happening just across the border,” he notes in reference to the Syrian civil war that is estimated to have cost over 300,000 lives.

“Maintaining one’s humanity: this is the immense courage bequeathed to us by the victims — and by you, the survivors of the Shoah,” Rivlin says.

— with Stuart Winer