Holocaust victims remembrance activities are held in Bashkiria

UFA, 27 January 2017. /Bashinform News Agency, Alim Faizov/. Today is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This year, UNESCO has dedicated this sorrowful date to the role of education, historical monuments and museums in understanding the Holocaust lessons. On the eve of the official date commemorative events were held at the headquarters of the international organization.

The State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau held a round table to discuss the challenges facing the memorials, museums and historical monuments, which witnessed the massacres and persecution. Also their role as educating institutions and witnesses of the crimes committed were considered.

The Jews living in Ufa never disregard the date of January 27th. They organize in memory of the dead musical and poetic lectures, recitals. The Holocaust always took an important place in the activities of the Jewish public organization "Kohav" in Bashkortostan.

The term "Holocaust" was used to name mass extermination of the Jewish population by the Nazis during 1933-1945. Then, 60 percent of the Jews living in Europe and the former Soviet Union were subjected to systematic persecution and annihilation in the concentration camps. The Nazis murdered nearly three million Jews during World War II.

It is believed that during the years of the Holocaust one third of the Jewish population in the world was killed.

Since 1953, Israel began to award people who hid Jews during the Holocaust the honourary title of "Righteous Among the Nations". Today, there are about 15 thousand such title holders in the different countries, including about 3.5 thousand citizens of the former USSR.

The native of the village of Bogorodskoye in Bashkortostan Nikolay Kiselev was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations in 2005. In 1942, he saved the lives of 218 Jews from Dolginovo village in Belarus, having taken them out of the front line. A monument to Nikolay Kiselev is established in Bogorodskoye, a rural school is named after him. The film "Kiselev's List" is shot about the hero.

In Moscow on Novy Arbat, near the Arbatskaya metro station a public garden named after Nikolay Kiselyov was opened on May 9, 2014.

On November 1, 2005, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution according to which January 27 was declared the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This date was chosen due to the fact that on this day in 1945 the Soviet Army liberated the largest Nazi death camp of Auschwitz -Birkenau in Poland. The initiators to adopt the resolution on the International Day of Holocaust were Russia, Israel, Canada, Australia and the United States, and more than 90 countries acted as its co-authors.