JAMAICA'S JEWISH community yesterday marked the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, 1945 by the Soviet Army.
An estimated 1.1 million to 1.5
million people, most of them Jews from Eastern Europe, were killed at the camp as part of a genocidal Nazi German programme during the Second World War.
"We shall mark the occasion with a prayer," said Ainsley Henriques, president of the Jamaica-Jewish Genealogical Society. Jamaica's Jews worship on Friday at the synagogue Shaare Shalom (Gates of Peace), located at the corner of Duke and Charles streets, downtown Kingston.
Jamaica has one of the longest-established Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere and the country also provided shelter to Jewish refugees in the Second World War. The refugees were forced to flee German- dominated Europe to escape a genocide which claimed the lives of six million European Jews and five million others.
LESSONS IGNORED
The Jewish community will comme-morate this Holocaust later in the year, Mr. Henriques said. Rather than focus on the Auschwitz liberation, he
said, "that (Holocaust) is the day we recognise."
Paying attention to these issues is important if recurrences are to be prevented, he said. "Not only Jews died in the Holocaust but millions of others including Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, blacks and gypsies."
If the world had existed peacefully over the past 60 years then there might be less need to mark what happened, he said. Instead, he said, "man's inhumanity to man" has continued.
"What is happening in Africa now is a disgrace," Mr. Henriques said. The lessons of the Nazi genocide are being ignored just as the tragedies in Rawanda and Darfur are being overlooked. "We need to remember it (the Holocaust) now more than ever," he said.
