Posted: | April 6, 2020 12:27 PM |
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From: | Representative Dan Frankel |
To: | All House members |
Subject: | Holocaust Remembrance 2020 |
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution of 6 million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime. The Nazis believed that Germans were “racially superior” and they wanted to create a “racially pure” state. Jews were considered a threat to the so-called German racial community. Other groups, including Soviet prisoners of war, gay men and women, Jehovah’s Witnesses, mentally and physically disabled individuals, Communists, and trade unionists were also targeted. Now, 80 years later, we are again seeing a rise in anti-Semitic words and attacks – precursors to the violence that wiped out two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. In 2018, Pittsburgh suffered the most deadly anti-Semitic attack to ever take place on American soil, when a man gunned down 11 people and wounded others celebrating Shabbat services in their Synagogue. As we work to ensure that the horrors of the Holocaust are never repeated, we know that no tool is more important than education. It is in this spirit that, every year, I introduce a resolution commemorating the people who lost their lives in the Holocaust. Please join me in proclaiming the week of April 19 through April 26, 2020, as "Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust" and April 21, 2020, as “Holocaust Remembrance Day” in the Commonwealth. |
Introduced as HR849