Today is Yom HaShoah. The White House has posted a Statement from Vice President Harris on Holocaust Remembrance Day (full text). The Statement says in part:
[I]n recent days in the United States, we have seen hateful rhetoric and harassment against Jews. This is Antisemitism and must be condemned unequivocally. Hate of any kind has no place in our country.
For the Jewish people, the past seven months have evoked the memories—along with fear and anguish—of the Holocaust. So to all the Jewish people around the world, know this: President Joe Biden and I stand with you. We will fight Antisemitism with the full force of the U.S. government, including through the first-ever National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. We will continue to stand with the people of Israel and its right to defend itself from those that threaten its existence. And we remain committed to Holocaust remembrance and education.
Like many Jewish Americans, my husband Doug has learned the harrowing stories of his family members that perished in the Holocaust. Last year, he traveled to the town where some of them lived in what is now Poland, and heard stories of family members shot and others who were deported to an unknown fate. He walked through the old Jewish Quarter of Krakow. And he visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the gas chambers, to bear witness.
President Biden will deliver the keynote address at tomorrow's commemoration at the Capitol Visitors Center, along with Congressional leaders.
UPDATE: On May 3, President Biden issued A Proclamation on Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust, 2024 declaring May 5 through May 12 as a week of observance of the Days of Remembrance. The Proclamation says in part:
I often reflect on memories of sitting around our kitchen table where my father would educate my siblings and me about the horrors of the Holocaust. Entire families wiped out. Communities savagely destroyed. Survivors left with memories and traumas that will never go away — even as the tattoos etched into their skin by the Nazis fade and the number of survivors dwindles. My dad taught us that silence is complicity — a lesson I have passed down to my children and grandchildren by taking them to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.
