The provincial government says it stands with Jewish communities to remember the Holocaust as they mourn and use the stories of victims and survivors to build a better world.
The province says it continues stand with Jewish friends and neighbours, and challenge anti-Semitism in all its forms.
A Holocaust memorial service was held in Ottawa yesterday.
Canada’s Special Envoy on Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Anti-Semitism, Deborah Lyons says the rise in anti-Semitism serves as an “urgent call” to action.
She calls it a reminder that the flame of remembrance not just reflect the past, but “illuminate the way to the future.”
Lāsma Artmane / Unsplash Auschwitz-Birkenau museum gate from the outside.
A local municipal leader with Jewish roots says remembering the Holocaust is absolutely essential.
Belleoram Mayor Steward May’s mother was a war bride from England whose sister and four-year-old nephew were killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz during WWII.
May says for years, he and his family were not aware that his mother was Jewish because she hid it from her family to protect them.
Altogether the family lost 40 members during the Holocaust.
May says his uncle wrote a book about his family’s ordeal.
He says the family was picked up by the Germans in Rotterdam and sent to concentration camps where his uncle was separated from his family. May says his uncle never saw his wife and son again but “kept himself going through 12 concentration camps, trying to see if he could find out what happened to them.”
