By Trevor Grundy
Religion News Service
CANTERBURY, England (RNS/ENInews) After the Nazi slaughter of 6 million Jews
during World War II, the world cried out "never again." But one of Britain's
best-known young rabbis, Jonathan Romain, said the phrase has proved
tragically wrong.
"Genocide has happened again and again and again," he told ENInews ahead of
Thursday's (Jan. 27) Holocaust Memorial Day observances 66 years after the
liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.
"We only have to think about Biafra, Bosnia, Darfur and there are other
examples," said Romain, a leading spokesman for Reform Judaism in the United
Kingdom. "The list is deeply depressing and screams out that Holocaust
Memorial Day is needed as much now as ever before."
Survivors and mourners have been asked by the Holocaust Memorial Trust in
London to remember victims of other mass killings -- the Democratic Republic
of Congo, where 5.4 million people have been killed since 1998; Cambodia,
where an estimated 1.7 million were murdered by the Khmer Rouge between 1975
and 1979; the Bosnian war in the 1990s that claimed at least 98,000 lives;
Burundi, with 50,000 deaths in 1993 and Rwanda, which saw 800,000 deaths in
1994 due to tribal conflict.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams emphasized this year's theme of
"lost stories."
"If the stories are not told over and again, we lose the memory of those who
suffered and we risk losing something that protects our humanity ... I
commend for our remembrance the untold stories of Jewish people living in
Britain during the medieval era, those of the Holocaust and the stories from
the genocidal tragedies of many other contexts in our deeply damaged world
today," he said in a statement.
Copyright © 2011 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
About Me
- Duong Dara
- Dara Duong was born in 1971 in Battambang province, Cambodia. His life changed forever at age four, when the Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1975. During the regime that controlled Cambodia from 1975-1979, Dara’s father, grandparents, uncle and aunt were executed, along with almost 3 million other Cambodians. Dara’s mother managed to keep him and his brothers and sisters together and survive the years of the Khmer Rouge regime. However, when the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia, she did not want to live under Communist rule. She fled with her family to a refugee camp on the Cambodian-Thai border, where they lived for more than ten years. Since arriving in the United States, Dara’s goal has been to educate people about the rich Cambodian culture that the Khmer Rouge tried to destroy and about the genocide, so that the world will not stand by and allow such atrocities to occur again. Toward that end, he has created the Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, which began in his garage and is now in White Center, Washington. Dara’s story is one of survival against enormous odds, one of perseverance, one of courage and hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment