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LOS ANGELES (CNS) - There will be a Yom HaShoah commemoration program Monday evening at the Museum of Tolerance, featuring a preview screening of the film, "The World Will Tremble," about how a group of prisoners attempt a seemingly impossible escape from the first Nazi death camp in order to provide the first eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust.
A question-and-answer session with director Lior Geller and star Charlie MacGechan will follow.
Admission to the 7 p.m. program is free but reservations are required and can be made at secure.wiesenthal.com/site/Ticketing?view=Tickets&id=102702
Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, was created under a 1953 law passed by the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. It is observed annually on the 27th of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar, which began at sundown on Sunday and ends at sundown on Monday.
There was a communitywide Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration at Holocaust Museum LA in Pan Pacific Park Sunday, marking the 80th anniversary of the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.
Mayor Karen Bass, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky and Julie Duhaut-Bedos, the French consul general in Los Angeles, were among the speakers.
Other scheduled speakers included 96-year-old Holocaust survivor Mary Bauer, who spent her childhood in Budapest, Hungary, survived Auschwitz, a death march and Ravensbrück concentration camp, Priscilla Schneider, a daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and Amy Conroy, a granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor.
Conroy is scheduled to share the story of her grandfather Nathan Rosenblatt, an Auschwitz survivor, at the museum at 1:30 p.m. Monday.
President Joe Biden issued a proclamation on Friday declaring Sunday through May 12 as the "Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust," and called "upon the people of the United States to observe this week and pause to remember victims and survivors of the Holocaust."
"As United States senator, as vice president, and now as president, I have met with many Holocaust survivors, promising them that our nation would neither forget what they endured nor ever again stand by silently in the face of antisemitism," Biden said in the proclamation.
"The charge has never been more urgent than in the aftermath of Hamas' vicious terrorist attack on October 7th -- the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Among the 1,200 innocent people who were slaughtered and the hundreds taken hostage were elderly survivors of the Shoah, who were forced to relive the horrors they thought they had escaped decades ago.
"My administration is working tirelessly to free the hostages who have been held by Hamas for over half a year -- and as I have said to their families, we will not rest until we bring them home."
Biden also noted the "alarming surge in antisemitism at home and abroad that resurfaces painful scars of millennia, of antisemitism and hate against the Jewish people," including "harassment and calls for violence against Jews -- in our schools, in our communities and online."
"This blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous," Biden said. "Antisemitic hate speech has absolutely no place on college campuses or anywhere else in our country. As Americans, we cannot stay silent as Jews are attacked, harassed, and targeted.
"We must also forcefully push back attempts to ignore, deny, distort, or revise the history of Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust or Hamas' murders and other atrocities committed on October 7th -- including the appalling and unforgivable use of rape and sexual assault to terrorize and torture Jewish women and girls."