Left to right: Minister and Solicitor General Nina Krieger, Holocaust survivor and keynote speaker Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, Premier David Eby and survivor Leo Vogel at the Legislative Assembly on April 14. <\/i>(photo from Province of BC)<\/i><\/p>\n
The annual Yom Hashoah commemoration ceremony at the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia took place on April 14, with political leaders, Holocaust survivors and representatives of the Vancouver and Victoria Jewish communities in attendance.<\/p>\n
Raj Chouhan, speaker of the Assembly, started the proceedings. \u201cNow, more than ever, it is important that we reflect on and remember the atrocities of the Holocaust and I stand in solidarity with you as we honour survivors today,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I think about the Holocaust, I think of the six million lives of men, women and children lost, the grief, the decimation of entire communities,\u201d said Premier David Eby. \u201cBeyond that, there is the extinguishment of so much potential that could have improved the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trevor Halford, interim leader of the BC Conservative Party, echoed the premier\u2019s sentiment, calling the Holocaust a genocide unprecedented in its scale. \u201cWe lost men, women and children.\u00a0 <\/span>We never got to see their full potential of what they could be or how they could change and impact this world,\u201d he said. \u201cWe must call out hate every time we see it. Every time. Each one of us.\u201d<\/p>\n Jeremy Valeriote, representing the BC Green Party, said that Yom Hashoah is not only a day of mourning but a call to action. \u201cIt reminds us of the dangers of hatred, antisemitism and indifference, and challenges us to confront injustice wherever we see it,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, an author, educator and survivor, was the keynote speaker. She described a happy, ordinary childhood in Poland in the 1930s. Hers was an assimilated family that participated in Jewish life. Her father was a lawyer and her mother had a large social circle consisting of many friends, both Jewish and not Jewish. That all changed in September 1939.<\/p>\n \u201cThere isn\u2019t a day that I don\u2019t ask myself why I survived. How did I survive when six million of us perished, and 1.5 million were children? And one of them was my sister. I lost my cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends, and the list goes on and on,\u201d Boraks-Nemetz said.<\/p>\n Commemorations, such as the one in Victoria, will hopefully ensure that an \u201capocalyptic event\u201d like the Holocaust never happens again, Boraks-Nemetz said. Through education, she said, we sow the seeds of truth and understanding, the lesson that racism, intolerance and prejudice must have no place in society.<\/p>\n Through the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Boraks-Nemetz and other survivors have spoken to thousands of schoolchildren in the province. She thanked Eby\u2019s government for mandating Holocaust education for students in Grade 10. \u201cThrough such actions, we may find a glimmer of hope for a better future,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Boraks-Nemetz is the author of several books that reflect on her experiences as a survivor and subsequent life in Canada. Her award-winning young adult novel, The Old Brown Suitcase<\/i> (1994), is used in school curricula to teach about the Holocaust and multiculturalism. Her most recent books are volumes of poetry, Out of the Dark<\/i> (2020) and Hidden Vision: Poems of Transformation<\/i> (2024), written under the name Jagna Boraks.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Towards the end of the commemoration, survivors Leo Vogel and Arlette Baker joined Boraks-Nemetz on stage to honour the victims of Nazi terror.<\/p>\n During the ceremony, Rabbi Meir Kaplan led attendees in prayer, and he reflected on how, over the last 20 years, the room had gone from being filled with survivors to having just a handful. Local community member Ari Hershberg read Boraks-Nemetz\u2019s poem, \u201cA Survivor Remembers the Six Million.\u201d<\/p>\n Nina Krieger, minister of public safety and solicitor general, and former executive director of the VHEC, essentially led the proceedings.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s by engaging with the Holocaust that we consider questions like, What is at stake to remain a bystander?\u201d she said. \u201cWhat are our obligations in times of moral crisis? We learn about the dangers of denial and distortion of history and memory.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sam Margolis<\/b> has written for the <\/i>Globe and Mail, the <\/i>National Post, UPI and MSNBC.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Left to right: Minister and Solicitor General Nina Krieger, Holocaust survivor and keynote speaker Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, Premier David Eby and survivor Leo Vogel at the Legislative Assembly on April 14. (photo from Province of BC) The annual Yom Hashoah commemoration ceremony at the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia took place on April 14, with political […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48869,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[53,1794,8676,9402,5768,8116,329],"class_list":["post-48868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","tag-holocaust","tag-lillian-boraks-nemetz","tag-remembrance","tag-second-generation","tag-survivor","tag-third-generation","tag-yom-hashoah"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}