The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27th of January, is marked at the Center of Jewish Cultural Heritage Synagogue Maribor with the annual project Shoah – Let us remember. As part of the project, which we have been implementing since 2010, we are preparing exhibitions, scientific meetings and various cultural events; we are connecting with many organizers of related events throughout Slovenia.
The Holocaust (lat. Holocaustum from gr. Holókauston “burnt offering”) is a label for the Nazi mass extermination of six million Jews during World War II. In international historiography, the term shoah (Hebrew: sho’ah (unexpected) ruin, destruction) is also used. The Holocaust marks the systematic persecution and destruction of European Judaism by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The main goal was to exterminate all Jews, what the Nazis called the “final solution to the Jewish question” or Endlösung. Members of various other ethnic, religious and political groups that were unacceptable to the Nazi regime (Roma, Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses), as well as homosexuals and the physically and mentally handicapped, were also targeted for decimation and eventual destruction.
The Holocaust also claimed many victims among Slovene Jews, especially in Prekmurje, where most of them lived in the pre-war period. In 1944, the Jewish community, which lived mainly in the area of Murska Sobota and Lendava, suffered a fatal blow and mass destruction in concentration camps. Most Slovene Jews died in Auschwitz.
Remembering the victims of the Holocaust, porajmos, Nazi persecution and genocide in general is the responsibility of all of us. And not only to forget the atrocities of Nazi crimes that had catastrophic consequences for the post-war generations of their victims and society in general, but also to draw attention to the extensions and phenomena of hatred and intolerance that lead to crimes against humanity.
The honorary patron of the project Shoah – Let Us Remember 2017 is dr. Milan Brglez, President of the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia.
The project was supported by the Municipality of Maribor and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and some individual events were supported by the embassies of the Republic of Poland, the State of Israel and Hungary.
