SACRAMENTO – Assemblymembers Ira Ruskin (D – Redwood City) and Lloyd Levine (D – Van Nuys) hosted the California Assembly Holocaust Memorial Ceremony as part of Holocaust Remembrance Week today.  One-hundred and twenty survivors and a hundred guests were in attendance to memorialize those who lost their lives and to tell the stories of those who survived.

“Today’s ceremony asks that we remember the Holocaust.  That we remember what happens when one group is allowed to exclude another group or when one group displays hatred of another group.  And it asks that we remember what happens when hatred is allowed to flourish and to bloom - when injustice is allowed to go on, and the rest of us remain silent,” Ruskin said.  

In order to ensure that the survivors’ experiences will be remembered by future generations, Assemblymembers Ruskin and Levine coordinated with Jewish agencies and synagogues to pair students with the survivors.  The students, during the time leading up to the ceremony, interviewed the survivors and wrote essays to describe the survivors’ experiences during the Holocaust, giving the young people an opportunity to hear first-hand about this tragic time.  The stories were compiled into a booklet and distributed to all the members of the State Assembly. 

Survivors sat with Assemblymembers at their desks during the ceremony, while students and other participants were invited to the gallery.  The keynote speaker was Mr. Frank Rothman, an 82 year old survivor of four different concentration camps, including Aushwitz. 
           
“Let us look into the faces of our honored visitors today, and pledge to carry the fight forward, to listen more attentively for the cries of those now suffering, when their plight is intentionally hidden from us by their organized abusers or made less painful to us by the distance of geography. Let us stand against those who violate the rights of human beings, remembering that we are really one tribe, one human tribe.  To believe otherwise, to do otherwise, shames us and demeans our souls and our human spirit,” Ruskin concluded.