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Queens lawmaker spearheads Assembly Holocaust Remembrance Day resolution

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Assemblywoman Nily Rozic (QNS file photo)

In observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, a resolution authored and introduced by Assemblywoman Nily Rozic was adopted by the New York State Assembly recognizing the 6 million Jewish victims of the tragedy and the 76th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

“Holocaust Remembrance Day serves as a stark reminder of what can happen when corrosive hate is allowed to take root. As we embark on the next four years, it is important that we come together to support one another to ensure our communities are safe for all New Yorkers,” Speaker Carl Heastie said.

Holocaust Remembrance Day serves to make sure that people across the nation and world never forget the painful past and horrors of the Holocaust, according to Rozic.

“We have a communal responsibility to speak out on behalf of the oppressed and denounce anti-Semitism and intolerance in all its manifestations,” Rozic said.

Rozic has led efforts to secure funding in the state budget to provide social services and programming for Holocaust survivors across New York. Rozic also sponsors state legislation to ensure the Holocaust is adequately taught in New York schools’ curriculum, in compliance with the existing requirements.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day was established by the United Nations General Assembly on Nov. 1, 2005, as it marks the date when Auschwitz-Bikenau, the largest Nazi death camp, was liberated by Soviet Troops in 1945.

Every year, the day is set aside for remembrance ceremonies that are held throughout the United States and around the world to remember the tragedy of the Holocaust on Jan. 27, including the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and in the halls of the United Nations in New York City.

From 1933 to 1945, 5.8 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust as part of a systemic program of genocide, and millions of other people perished as victims of Nazism. Jews who fell under German control in Eastern and Central Europe were stripped of their rights and property.

The Jews who perished at Nazi hands comprised two-thirds of all European Jewry, and in countries such as Poland, which before the second World War included parts of the Ukraine and Belarus, the Jewish death toll surpassed 90 percent.

The year 2021 marks the 86th Anniversary of the beginning of the genocide of European Jews, “the bleakest, most murderous moment in history,” and the Holocaust represents the “darkest period in the civilization of mankind,” according to the resolution.

The resolution states that “it is critically important to remember the events of the Holocaust to ensure that the events shall ‘never again’ happen, as has been the rallying cry among the Jewish people.”