THE EVENT OF THE EPIRO REGION AND THE I.K. IOANNINE FOR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2023 - Central Jewish Council of Greece, coordinating body of the Jewish Communities of Greece

Details: Created : January 30, 2023

On January 28, 2023, the event of the Region of Epirus, the Gani Foundation and the I.K. Ioannina for Holocaust Remembrance Day. The program included two extremely interesting speeches: by the Rector of the University of Ioannina, Anna Batistatos, on "The theory of eugenics from the time of Darwin to the Holocaust" and by Dr. Philosophy by Maria Stratsani on the topic "Art in the death camps". This was followed by a small concert by the string quartet of the Municipal Conservatory of Ioannina by Gerasimos Lolis, Alexandros Lolis, Alexandros Theoharis and Ambrosios Vlachopoulos, with the soprano Irini Dova. KISE was represented at the event by G.G. Victor Eliezer who delivered a greeting.

During the event, a greeting was given by Deputy Governor Odysseas Potsis, who emphasized that "this same Europe went through the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, but it also experienced the Middle Ages and other dark pages such as that of the Holocaust. So our promise is that something like this should never happen again."

Carrying his greeting Mayor Moses Elisaf, who is absent for health reasons, his special adviser Christos Papadopoulos he emphasized that "the memory of Auschwitz must constitute the collective memory against all prejudice, all xenophobia, and to be a fruitful memory, it must not be reduced to the concept of the mourning of a single people. It must be reduced to a symbolic memory against any prejudice, much more so today when the organization of our societies tends towards a democracy which must in fact be a synthesis of differences and which, if it wants to be sustainable and effective, must protect equally the citizens".

Η President of the Spiritual Center of Ioannina Eleni Akonidou in her speech she noted that new wars, new atrocities and new displacements come to remind us that final solutions unfortunately arise every day in every era. As he added, "the day of commemoration of the Greek Jewish Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust is not a memorial, but a reminder and debt permanently open and its symbolism is also present today".

The keynote speeches of the event were made by pr. president of the Spiritual Center Maria Stratsani, which analyzed the ways in which prisoners made art inside the death camps and the Rector of the University of Ioannina Anna Batistatou, which noted that Nazi Germany took cruel and inhumane eugenics measures during the Holocaust where 200.000 Germans with genetic and psychiatric diseases were killed.

Here is the greeting of the General Secretary of KISE Victor Isaac Eliezer:

Before starting this greeting, I would like to express the sorrow of Greek Jewry for the brutal murder of seven of our co-religionists by terrorists, while they were praying in a Jerusalem synagogue, and to wish for sobriety to prevail in the face of fanaticism and intolerance.

Allow me now to dedicate myself to a man who with his presence honors the city of Ioannina, honors medical science, honors the intellect, honors the human condition: To Moses Elisaph, who is here today with us, mentally and spiritually and we wish him to continue to inspire us for many - many years to come, because we all need him by our side, close to us.

Look next to you, there is no longer a Gianniotis Jew, a living witness to the horrors of the hells, where people ceased to be people but numbers, engraved on the arm...

On January 26, two days ago, Yad Vashem, the global Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, presented at the United Nations headquarters a new exhibition entitled "Book of Names of Victims of the Holocaust".

This monumental work includes in alphabetical order the names of 4.800.000 victims of the Holocaust, which to this day are documented and included in Yad Vashem's Central Database of Names of Shoah Victims. The total length of the Book of Names is 8 meters, it is 2 meters high and one meter wide. A streak of light runs through the interior of the Book of Names, illuminating the memory of Jewish men and women and children murdered during the Holocaust for all to remember. At the end of the Book of Names are blank pages symbolizing more than a million identities yet to be reclaimed from the nameless murdered.

Where possible, entries in the Book of Names also contain the dates of birth, hometowns and circumstances and places of death of the respective victims.

As the President of Yad Vashem Dani Dayan specifically mentioned

"The Book of Names serves as a living memorial to millions of Holocaust victims and provides the public with the opportunity to touch and connect with the identities of the individuals the Nazis tried so hard to erase. We must remember these people, not as faceless and anonymous victims, as the Nazis saw them, but as people with unique life stories as we are today."

Let me read the lyrics of a poem written by the Israeli poetess

ZELDA (Miškovsky) 1914 – 1984

EVERY PERSON HAS HIS NAME

Every man has his own name

God given.

And, still, given by his father and mother.

Every person has a name

Given to him by his stature

And given the way he smiles

And given, even, by his clothes.

Every person has a name

Given to him by the mountains

And given to him by the walls that stand around him.

Every person has a name

Given to him by the planets

And given to him by the neighbors.

Every person has a name

Given to him by his sins

And given by his lusts.

Every man has his name

Given to him by enemies

And given to him by love.

Every person has a name

Given to him from his feast day

And given to him by his labor.

Every man has his name

Given to him by the seasons of the year

And given to him from his own abyss.

Every person has a name.

Given to him by the sea.

And given to him by his death.

Source of Greek rendering: "Jewish poetry", Kostis Moskof, Kastaniotis Publications, Athens 1997.

This "Book of Names", like ZELDA's poem, is a call to remembrance: to remember every child, every woman and every man who perished in the Holocaust, as a person with a name and a future that was denied in the name of bigotry and of intolerance. In the name of the "Final Solution" of the "Jewish problem", as it was highlighted by Adolf Hitler and applauded by the great majority of the German people. A crime that was carried out with the Nazi abusers and the German extermination machine but also with the tolerance of the spectators, with the tolerance of many governments, many local lords, who then rushed to loot the properties of those who were forcibly displaced and brutally killed in Auschwitz, Bergenau, Majdanek, Bergen Belsen and the other extermination camps. It is a call to action: to be ever vigilant and never to remain silent when human rights and human dignity are threatened. Exactly the way they stood up to barbarity, the few, the "Righteous Among the Nations", who at the risk of their lives saved their Jewish fellow citizens, their fellow human beings.

The victims of the Holocaust, these people, who were our relatives, friends, neighbors, fellow citizens, fellow human beings, we remember them with the "We remember" campaign and that is why Parliaments and Municipal buildings, in Europe, in Greece and here in Ioannina, are illuminated... to show that the "light of memory" prevails over the "darkness of oblivion".

* Data from website morning speech, 30.1.2023

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