On January 27, 2014, the Almaty Jewish Community Center “Rimon” hosted a rally commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. The opening speech was given by the President of the Kazakhstan Association of Jewish Communities “Mitzvah,” Euro-Asian Jewish Congress Presidium member Alexander Baron.

 

“For me - and I think for most of you, as well - this date means a personal tragedy,” Baron said. “In the small town where my relatives lived, the Fascists made all the Jews go into a mine and blew up the entrance. Last year I had visited Krakow, Poland, on this date. There were two concentration camps there during the war: Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz 2. Not only Jews had been killed at these death factories, and we grieve with the whole world. But the overwhelming majority of those who died were our familr and friends, and they died merely because they had been Jewish. So before continuing this rally, let us honor their memory with a minute of silence.”

The rally’s guest of honor Vlastimil Samek, a representative of the UN Department of Public Information, presented the gathering with the recorded address of the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who had also visited Auschwitz in the previous year. “I saw the frightening remains of the machine of genocide,” the address said, “as well as deeply touching moments of Jewish family life in the 1930s: photographs of weddings, family dinners, religious rites, and other scenes of the simple everyday life that had been destroyed during the systematic campaign of murders that has no equivalent in the history of mankind. The UN had been founded so that this sort of horror would never be repeated. Still, the tragedies that took place in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Srebrenica are testament to the poison of genocide still coursing through the veins of our planet. We need to be vigilant before fanatism, extremist ideologies, conflicts between communities, and discrimination towards minorities. And we need to teach our children the right values.”

Everyone present had been able to light a candle in the memory of those who had died in the Holocaust. The rally ended with a showing of the documentary “Blinky & Me” about the Australian animated film producer and director Yoram Gross, who had lived in Poland during the war and who had made it through all the horrors of genocide.