Sydney commemorates the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

January 30, 2025 by J-Wire Newsdesk
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Holocaust survivors, their families, members of the Jewish community and dignitaries commemorated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

On 27 January 1945, the Soviet Army liberated the infamous German Nazi concentration and extermination camp. One million Jewish people were killed at Auschwitz, the largest single site of the Nazi genocidal policy.

John Howard

Eighty years after the horrors of the Holocaust, Jewish communities and those survivors who built new lives here after the war, are living through a new wave of Jew hatred that they never expected to see in their lifetime. For Australia’s Jewish community, the past weeks have been overshadowed by acts of vandalism, violence and personal targeting that eerily hark back to the pogroms and actions against the Jews of Europe that led to the Holocaust.

The commemorative event, held at The Great Synagogue, was organised by the Sydney Jewish Museum in partnership with the Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants and The Great Synagogue. More than 350 guests at the event were addressed by keynote speaker former prime minister John Howard,  Auschwitz survivors Jack Meister and Yvonne Engelman in a pre-recorded message, and by Anthony Levin, grandson of the late Holocaust survivor Olga Horak. Speakers reflected on this year’s theme of the day: “For a better future”.

Jack Meister and John Howard

In her pre-recorded address, Holocaust survivor Yvonne Engelman urged young people to remember the lessons from the Holocaust and to stand up to the hatred. She said: “The 6 million who were murdered, including 1.5 million children, have to be commemorated because it is so important that this shall never happen again. I have come to the museum for 32 years to teach and tell the young people how we were treated, with such hatred and indescribable conditions. I tell the young people to stand up, say “that’s wrong” and treat others the way you would like to be treated yourself.”

Sydney Jewish Museum CEO Kevin Sumption, John Howard and George Foster

On the importance of the commemoration and to his hope for the future, John Howard said: “Tonight is an occasion to remember with sorrow and an appropriate level of rancour, the failure of mankind to prevent this appalling tragedy that befall the world… Nothing can alter the fact that the world owes a massive and continuing sense of shame about what happened to the Jewish people… It’s also an occasion for all of us to rededicate ourselves to the fight against anti-Semitism. I have every hope that if we do that, we can regain that time when we felt it was part and parcel of our existence.”

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