The head of the Jewish community of Kazakhstan, member of the People’s Assembly of Kazakhstan and the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress Presidium Alexander Baron participated in the international forum “Sherli Shejire Amanaty,” which took place in Uralsk and was timed to the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions. The forum was part of the project of the People’s Assembly of Kazakhstan “Memory for the Future.”

Participants of the forum included Kazakhstan Secretary of State Gulshara Abdykhalikova, Deputy Chairman of the People’s Assembly of Kazakhstan Yeraly Tugzhanov, and foreign scholars and experts.

When speaking at the forum, Alexander Baron told the gathering about his experience in 1995, when, in a preliminary meeting for the creation of the People’s Assembly of Kazakhstan, President Nursultan Nazarbayev allowed all those present to read copies of archived execution lists. “They gave us these documents, we read them and felt pain impossible to convey in words,” Baron said. “When you read 30 names to a list titled “For Execution” and see the “Carried out” under those names, you feel utter fear. We mustn’t forget these dark pages of history; we must remember them and pass the memory on, so that this horror, when people were shot according to lists, would never repeat itself.”

Alexander Baron presented the Secretary of State with a collection of articles published after the International conference “History. Memory. People.”