January 27 is the International Day of Holocaust Remembrance. It was on this day that the Auschwitz death camp was liberated, where, according to various estimates, 2.5 to 4 million people were killed, including more than 1.5 million Jews.
On January 29, representatives of the city and regional authorities gathered near the monument to the victims of the Holocaust on Fentsyk square in Uzhgorod. In particular, the mayor of Uzhgorod Bohdan Andriyiv, the deputy head of the Transcarpathian Regional State Administration Volodymyr Kolesnikov, the deputy chairman of the Regional Council Petro Hrytsyk, the director of the charity fund "Hesed Shpira" Mykhailo Halin, the chief rabbi Uzhgorod and Transcarpathian Wilhelm Menachem Mendel, representatives of the Jewish community.
According to Mykhailo Halin, almost the entire Jewish community of Transcarpathia, which is 127 thousand people, was killed in Auschwitz. "Memory is so impermanent. Something remains, something is lost. But these events are not forgotten. If we were to ask young people what was in the building of the present Philharmonic, they probably would not know that it was a Jewish synagogue. But older people remember that this place was once bustling with life. Jews accounted for 35% of the population in Uzhgorod, in Mukachevo – almost half. These people are gone, and so is their culture. We are trying to revive it now." The mayor of the city Bogdan Andriyiv said that the most important thing is to prevent that page in history from ever repeating itself.
After that, the rabbi read the Kaddish (memorial prayer) in Hebrew, and after a minute of silence, they lit six candles and laid flowers to the monument.
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