A new social media campaign initiated by the World Jewish Congress (WJC) encourages people from all over the world to upload photographs of themselves holding a paper with the text "We remember." The campaign's intention is to raise awareness amongst international youth about the Holocaust.
Next week, to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed annually on January 27, some of the photographs will be projected on a huge screen put up next to Crematorium 2 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
The campaign began last week and used the hashtag #WeRemember. Sources in the WJC said that people of all ages took part, Jews and gentiles alike, and even Holocaust survivors who were photographed with their families.
Senior politicians and public figures participated in the campaign in Austria, Belgium and Germany. On Thursday, the German newspaper Bild published an article on the campaign showing senior figures in the country with the sign.
The WJC's CEO, Robert Singer, explained that he considered it his organization's "responsibility responsibility to speak out and make sure that it never happen again, to anyone or anywhere in the world."
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President Rivlin also took part, in English and in Hebrew (Photo: President's Residence)
(צילום: דוברות בית הנשיא)
He explained that the "goal is to reach those who don’t know much about the Holocaust, or who might be susceptible to those who deny it entirely, and to remind the world that such horrors could happen again."
He warned, "Anti-Semitism is more prevalent today than it has been at any time since World War II, and bigotry and discrimination still rear their ugly heads all around the world."