On the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day the Jewish association WerteInitiative e.V. appeals to the German Bundestag:
The day of remembrance for the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp should call not only for remembering, but also for acting today. Never Again is now!
Berlin, 26 January 2024 – International Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day on which the memory and commemoration of the people murdered in the Holocaust is cultivated. Remembering, however, must not be an end in itself; it must lead to action in the here and now. That politicians know what urgently needs to be done in the fight against antisemitism has been demonstrated by the parliamentary groups of the traffic-light coalition parties and of the CDU/CSU in the German Bundestag: in the run-up to the day of remembrance for the Reichspogromnacht of 9 November 1938 the parliamentary groups introduced promising, concrete catalogues of measures for combating hatred of Jews in the German Bundestag. We expressly welcome the fact that in them antisemitism has finally been appropriately recognised as a cross-cutting issue and is to be combated across all areas – from education and criminal law, the IHRA definition of antisemitism, BDS, the arts and cultural sector, residence and citizenship law, through to funding policy, both at home and abroad. (Here you can access both motions: traffic-light coalition parties and CDU/CSU.) The motions were not adopted; they are being deliberated further in these days. We hope, that in these deliberations they will gain in precision of detail and in impact, that they will result in a joint motion by the four parliamentary groups and that in doing so they will incur no losses in substance .
Our executive board declares:
“It is not enough to renew the promise of ‘Never Again’ every year on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. These days it is being decided whether politics and society can guarantee the safeguarding of Jewish life in Germany, or whether the resilience of our democracy will fail.”
With an art action in the form of a video projection in City-West and City-Ost we will draw attention on Saturday, 27 January 2024 to the continuities of antisemitism in Germany since the Shoah.
Contact for enquiries: Anna Staroselski / spokesperson of the association kontakt@werteinitiative.de / Tel: 030 / 234 580 20
About the association WerteInitiative – jüdisch-deutsche Positionen e.V.: since 2014 WerteInitiative has established itself as a civil-society Jewish voice in Germany. We set out to secure the future of Jewish life in Germany. We therefore campaign for strengthening the values of the free democratic basic order from a Jewish perspective. We do this by promoting values-based political, social and media discourse, Jewish civic engagement in Germany and the German-Israeli relationship. For further information we kindly ask you to visit our website: https://werteinitiative.de/
