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European Union leaders pledged on Wednesday they would fight rising anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial witnessed during the coronavirus pandemic, on the eve of annual commemorations of Auschwitz’s liberation.
European Council President Charles Michel said the lessons of the Holocaust were now “more important than ever”.
“First, because the Jews feel threatened and they are threatened. They are also attacked in Europe. Just because they are Jews. We do not accept this. “We will never accept it,” he said.
Michel spoke at an online event hosted by the European Jewish Congress, which was also attended by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola.
The European Commission last year introduced a new strategy to better address hate speech, raise awareness of the lives of Jews, protect places of worship and ensure that the Holocaust is not forgotten.
According to the European Agency for Fundamental Rights, nine out of 10 Jews think that anti-Semitism has increased in their country and is a serious problem.
With the widespread circulation of false information about the Holocaust on the Internet, the President of the European Jewish Congress, Moshe Kantor, cited the vast amount of time spent online during the coronavirus pandemic as one of the reasons for the rise of anti-Semitism.
He urged EU leaders to step up their efforts to connect with young Europeans to make them more aware of the Holocaust.
“We need to better understand their concerns and aspirations and speak to them in their own language,” he said.
“There has been a tsunami of lies about Jews, Israel and the Holocaust over the last two years, so we need to come up with new strategies to reach out to those who are consuming this information innocently,” he added.
With France holding the rotating EU presidency, the Holocaust-focused Jewish Congress Ceremony is in France, on the 80th anniversary of the Velodrome d’Hiver rally, a mass arrest of Jews by French police in Paris in 1942.
French President Emmanuel Macron said he had taken action to dismantle groups that promote hatred and expressed regret that “the falsifications of history are back.”
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, many commemorations of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Thursday will be held online again this year.
However, a small ceremony will take place at the site of the former death camp at Auschwitz, where Nazi German forces of World War II killed 1.1 million people in occupied Poland.
The memorial site was closed earlier during the pandemic but reopened in June.
The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in November 2005 establishing the annual commemoration and choosing January 27, the day Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated from Soviet troops in 1945.
In total, about 6 million European Jews and millions of other people were killed by Germans and their collaborators during the Holocaust. About 1.5 million were children./REL/
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