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WJC raising awareness to honor memory of all victims of genocide
The WJC is committed to preserving the memory of all victims of genocide, as part of its core mission to ensure that the promise of ‘never again’ declared after the horrors of the Holocaust truly means ‘never again’. As such, the WJC has engaged in a series of campaigns to raise awareness of the war-time massacres perpetrated against minority populations in countries including Rwanda and Bosnia, as well as against the Romani people during the Holocaust.
Exposing the truth about Srebrenica and Priejdor
In July 2020, the WJC launched a widespread campaign to bring international attention to the 25th anniversary of the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia. More than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered by Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces, and over 25,000 women, children, and elderly men were deported under horrific conditions. The WJC remains committed to exposing and condemning attempts by government officials in Republika Srbska, one of the entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in Serbia, to deny that the mass killings constitute genocide and to glorify the perpetrators of the massacre. During a WJC Jewish Diplomatic Corps webinar, Srebrenica Genocide survivor Adisada Dudić Hoque recounted her family’s harrowing story of survival
Over the course of the month-long campaign, the WJC and members of its flagship program, the WJC Jewish Diplomatic Corps, attended commemorative events; held webinars with Srebrenica genocide survivors; recorded video messages for the global commemoration; launched a social media campaign urging unity against all forms of racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism; published online and newspaper articles and op-eds in multiple languages and publications; and engaged in a series of diplomatic efforts, including letters sent to the local diplomatic missions of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
WJC leaders have echoed the call of the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe Dunja Mijatović, who joined the WJC for a WebTalk on the subject, to mark 11 July as the official Remembrance Day for the victims of the Srebrenica Genocide.
In June 2020, the WJC launched a social media campaign to raise awareness of the massacres carried out in the Bosnian city of Prjedor against the (non-Serbian) Bosnian and Croatian citizens, over the course of the 1992-1995 wars. These innocent men, women, and children were forced to endure suffering in numerous concentration camps, with more than 3,000 killed simply because of their ethnic and religious background.
Representatives of the WJC took part in a commemorative event outside of the United Nations in Geneva on 7 April 2021 to mark 27 years since the genocide against the Tutsi people in Rwanda, in which more than one million people were massacred, and pledged that the organization would continue to learn and share the tragic lessons of history to ensure that history does not repeat itself. On 27 January 2020, at the official International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in Kigali, Rwanda, South African WJC Jewish Diplomatic Corps member Chaya Singer noted that the Holocaust and Rwandan genocide both began with hateful rhetoric. The ceremony also included a prayer led by the first permanent Rabbi of Rwanda, Rabbi Haim Bar Sella.
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the massacre in 2019, the WJC and the Permanent Commemorating the genocide of the Tutsi people in Rwanda at the UN in Geneva, April 2021 Credit: Courtesy of WJC
Mission of Rwanda to the United Nations honored Father Patrick Desbois, founder and president of the global humanitarian organization Yahad–In Unum, with the inaugural Raphael Lemkin Award, named in memory of the Polish-Jewish lawyer and refugee who coined the term “genocide” and initiated the Genocide Convention.
From left: From left: WJC Jewish Diplomatic Corps (WJC JDCorps) Deputy Director Yfat BarakCheney, WJC JDCorps Steering Committee Member Ruth Ouazana (France), Chair of the WJC JDCorps Steering Committee Eli Novershtern (Israel), WJC JDCorps Steering Committee Member Gabriel Buznick (Argentina), WJC President Ronald S. Lauder, WJC JDCorps President Sonat Birnecker Hart (US), WJC JDCorps Steering Committee Members Tamara Fathi and Amichai Wise (Canada), Head of WJC Strategy & Programs and JDCorps Executive Director Daniel Radomski, and WJC JDCorps steering committee member Ariel Krok (Brazil) in the Hamptons, New York,
August 2019 Credit: Shahar Azran
