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Wednesday, 26 January 2022 09:52 |
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 The illumination of the imposing façade of the City Hall of Athens with the logo of the WJC #WE REMEMBER campaign, began in the evening of January 26, 2022. The illumination will continue tomorrow, on the 27th of January 2022, as a tribute to the International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the National Remembrance Day for the Greek Jews Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust.
The Municipality of Athens participates for the first time in #WE REMEMBER with this symbolic action of raising social awareness, for the implementation of which the Mayor of Athens Kostas Bakoyiannis and the staff of his office were immediately mobilized, in spite of adversities caused by the extreme weather conditions that afflicted Athens. The city of Athens remembers the darkness of the Holocaust of the 6.000.000 Jews and “lights up” the future with the values of democracy and humanism. This is the dynamic message transmitted by the City Hall of Athens.
The Hellenic Parliament will also participate in this year’s #WE REMEMBER campaign with the illumination of its building, which will take place in the evening of the 27th of January 2022. |
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Wednesday, 26 January 2022 09:50 |
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 WE REFLECT on today’s anniversary: January 27, 1945, the liberation of Auschwitz. The world astonished in front of the human skeletons, in front of the magnitude of horror. The miserable survivors of the Holocaust had already evacuated the death camp and were walking, amidst the snowy rural Poland, the ‘death marches’, yet looking ahead towards freedom.
WE REMEMBER the 6.000.000 Jews, amongst whom the 67.000 Greek Jews, victims of the Nazi atrocities, who were deported, tortured and brutally murdered in the German concentration and extermination camps around Europe. Our relatives, our friends, our neighbors.
WE REMEMBER the Righteous among the Nations, all those who put their own lives in danger and contributed to the rescue of their fellow citizens who were persecuted only because they were born Jewish. Those who enlightened with their humanism the darkness of and Nazism.
WE RESPECT those who managed to come out alive from the hell of Auschwitz and the other extermination camps, who are still standing by us, as living witnesses of the horrors they suffered and leaders of the fight against Holocaust denial.
WE GET OPTIMISTIC when teachers and students visit places of martyrdom, when they see, listen, read, learn. This is the “light” of remembrance so that humanity never forgets all inhuman atrocities of the Holocaust, so that we transmit the universal message against intolerance and antisemitism.
Athens, January 26, 2022
Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece |
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Friday, 28 January 2022 08:10 |
 Honouring, Rethinking, Acting.Today, we commemorate the victims and survivors of the hatred that was the driving force of a totalitarian, criminal regime and its collaborators. Absolute responsibility and duty of all of us, who choose to be called heirs of humanitarian and democratic values, is to honour the victims and survivors, to reflect upon their legacy and to act with this in mind.
Today, we commemorate the Jews, as well as the other victims of the Nazi Regime who suffered and died cruelly, inhumanly, all of them victims of an absurd, unthinkable, targeted hatred. We commemorate six million Jews of all ages, six million innocent people, who had committed no crime. Today, it is also an opportunity to remember the survivors, who have never ceased to remember, for the rest of their lives, the terror and the extreme violence they experienced.
Our remembrance is an elementary imperative. Equally elementary is our duty to reflect and rethink about the conditions under which the unthinkable happened. So that we will never have to admit again that “I was first seeing the dead and then the murder occurred”, as the Greek Nobel laureate poet, Odysseus Elytis, cautions.
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Monday, 03 January 2022 14:30 |
 Following the announcement with which KIS welcomed the news of the return from Moscow to Greece of the pre-War archives of the Greek Jewish Communities, KIS President David Saltiel and Secretary General Victor Eliezer, in their letter -dated December 15, 2021- to Russian President Putin, express the satisfaction of the Greek Jewry upon Russia’s decision which is important to the Greek Jewish Community.On behalf of the Russian side, the Cultural Attaché of the Russian Embassy to Greece, Th. Kalaidov, contacted KIS President on January 2nd, 2022, and conveyed President Putin’s assent to KIS’s views as presented in the letter which we publish here under in English translation:
Honourable President Putin,
On behalf of the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece, which is the umbrella organization and the coordination body of the Jews of Greece, we wish to express our all hearted thankfulness for your decision to return to Greece the pre-War Archives of the Greek Jewish Communities that were looted by the Nazis during the German occupation of our country and were transported to Moscow by the Red Army after the takeover of Berlin in May 1945.
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The Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis posted on his