Today President Biden issued a Proclamation (full text) designating April 4 through April 11 as Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust. The Proclamation reads in part:
On Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day — we stand in solidarity with the Jewish people in America, Israel, and around the world to remember and reflect on the horrors of the Holocaust. An estimated six million Jews perished alongside millions of other innocent victims — Roma and Sinti, Slavs, disabled persons, LGBTQ+ individuals, and others — systematically murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in one of the cruelest and most heinous campaigns in human history....
I remember learning about the horrors of the Holocaust from my father when I was growing up, and I have sought to impart that history to my own children and grandchildren in turn. I have taken them on separate visits to Dachau, so that they could see for themselves what happened there, and to impress on them the urgency to speak out whenever they witness anti-Semitism or any form of ethnic and religious hatred, racism, homophobia, or xenophobia. The legacy of the Holocaust must always remind us that silence in the face of such bigotry is complicity — remembering, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, that there are moments when “indifference to evil is worse than evil itself.”
