The Diplomat
Yesterday, the Senate hosted, for the twelfth consecutive year, the solemn State act in Remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust on the occasion of the Official Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Prevention of Crimes against Humanity, institutionalized in 2005 by the General Assembly of the UN and the European Parliament.
During the meeting, the president of the Upper House, Pedro Rollán, recalled the recent massacre of the Hamas terrorist organization in Israel and addressed young people to commit to remembering to avoid another barbarity. “Any hint of anti-Semitism must be denounced,” he warned.
For his part, the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, stated that Europe has the moral duty to remember all the people who were murdered by the Nazi regime. “Education, pedagogy and public memory policies are essential so that the youngest, who were born and raised in democracy and in a prosperous and tolerant Europe, do not fall into the networks of the hate speeches of the heirs of terror,” added Torres, who also remembered the more than five thousand Spanish republicans murdered in Nazi concentration camps.
The president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain (FCJE), Isaac Benzaquén, also remembered the victims of the Hamas attack, “the most brutal episode that the Jewish people have suffered since the Holocaust,” and insisted on the need to combat anti-Semitism that “has re-emerged strongly in Spain and the world.”
Diego Fernández, director of the Institute of Cultura Gitana, reviewed the murders, persecutions and suffering of the Gypsy people during the Nazi regime in Germany and assured that in Spain there continues to be “institutional discrimination” against this group. For her part, Concepción Díaz Berzosa, vice president of Amical Mauthausen and other camps, remembered the hundreds of thousands of political opponents of the Nazi regime who were persecuted and murdered. “Auschwitz is the dehumanizing act par excellence,” she said.
Pedro René Perez, Holocaust survivor, son of a Jewish father and Catholic mother and Austrian by birth, offered his shocking testimony about the persecution he suffered in his childhood and assured that, as “the last Sephardim of the Vienna community,” he felt very happy to return to Spain.
After the speeches, six candles were lit in memory of the victims and a prayer was offered for the victims by the president of the Rabbinical Council of Spain, Rabbi Moisés Bendahan. The general director of the Sefarad-Israel Center, Jaime Moreno Bau, acted as master of ceremonies.
The Israeli ambassador to Spain, Rodica Radian-Gordon, was also present in the Senate and participated in another event in remembrance of the Holocaust organized by the Sefarad-Israel Center at Madrid City Hall. During this ceremony, the ambassador denounced “the growing wave of hatred against Jews and Israelis, as individuals and as a collective,” a “very worrying phenomenon, since we know the consequences of the deep substratum of anti-Semitism that had accumulated for centuries before the Holocaust.”
