Ukraine’s Jewish PM tells Rivlin of his country’s ‘Righteous’ during the Holocaust

President Reuven Rivlin meets Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman at his residence in Jerusalem Monday morning.

Groysman is leading a delegation of his government’s ministers for wide-ranging talks with their Israeli counterparts.

The only Jewish prime minister in the world besides Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Groysman tells Rivlin about his visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum earlier in the day.

“It was a tragic page in history and is directly related to Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, and we are proud to have had 2,500 ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ who represented Ukraine,” Groysman says, according to a press statement from the President’s Residence.

The Holocaust was “a real tragedy, the murder of six million Jews just for being Jews, and this horrible figure includes 1.5 million children.”

Rivlin responds that “when we say as Jews ‘never again,’ we are not preaching to our people. We learned the lesson, we know what we have to do…. When we are talking about what happened, we have to teach all people [in the world] in order that it will not happen again. Fascism is a phenomenon, Nazism is a phenomenon, and it was all over Europe, there were a lot of people who thought like the Nazis about the Jews, and every one of us has to learn the lesson for their own people. No one can ignore the facts of history.”

Rivlin praises Groysman for “what you are doing against hatred, against fascism, and against anti-Semitism.”

Groysman replies that his visit was meant to “develop [an] even better relationship with our friend Israel, and to deepen our strategic partnership.”