This Saturday, Westgate Chapel in Pembroke will be hosting a World Holocaust Memorial Day service.
The service will be conducted by Rev’d Joel Barder and will be held at 7pm on Saturday, January 27.
Holocaust Memorial Day is the day for everyone to remember the millions of people murdered in the Holocaust, under Nazi Persecution.
Between 1941 and 1945, in what has come to be known as the Holocaust, six million Jewish men, women and children were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Their attempt to murder all the Jews in Europe shook the foundations of civilisation.
This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day theme is Fragility of Freedom.
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That is when the trouble started for the Jews. Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees.
– Anne Frank, diary entry, Saturday 20 June, 1942 – reflecting back on May 1940 when the Germans arrived in the Netherlands
In 1933, the Nazis came to power in Germany and life became increasingly difficult for German Jews.
Anti-Jewish legislation was passed, which denied Jews many freedoms and restricted their rights, starting with removing them from certain professions and schools and universities.
The Nuremberg Laws in 1935 restricted who Jews could marry, and went further than that: they defined anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents as a Jew, regardless of whether or not that person saw themselves as Jewish.
On 9 November 1938, Jewish shops and businesses in Nazi territories were attacked and destroyed. The night became known as The Night of Broken Glass. Jewish people were banned from cinemas, theatres and sports facilities.
As the German army swept through and started occupying European countries, Jewish people in those countries often had many of their freedoms taken away: they were forced into ghettos, living in cramped conditions and often doing hard labour for the Nazis or for German industries; they were deported to concentration or death camps. And this was simply because they were Jewish.
It didn’t stop there. The Nazis targeted anyone they believed threatened their ideal of a ‘pure Aryan race’, including Roma and Sinti people, disabled people, gay people, political opponents and others.
Holocaust Memorial Day is also a day to remember the genocides which followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.
The above information is gleaned from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust website.