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Honourable Rabbi Elyahu Birnbaum, representing the Chief Rabbi of Israel,
Honourable President of the Lisbon Jewish Community
Honourable Rabbi of the Lisbon Synagogue
Members of the Lisbon Jewish Community,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The United Nations General Assembly, through resolution No. 60/7 dated November 1, 2005, created the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and chose January 27 for its celebration, in remembrance of the already distant date, in 1945, when the reality of Auschwitz was revealed.
We are gathered here today to perform a duty of remembrance. Are we able to understand what happened? No, we cannot understand. We are unable to understand a rational, bureaucratic and systematic procedure, carefully planned and designed, to carry out what is irrational.
However, even if our words are irremediably poor to describe that concentrated horror, it is our duty to speak out. We have the duty to remember a world where Good was absent, a world which denied man because it denied the right to be different.
Millions were martyred, especially Jews. We honour the memory of all victims. But, when man is so radically denied, the greatest victim is humanity itself.
Memory commences as an effort to reconstitute a past which cannot be denied. This is more than obligatory justice. Against indifference, against forgetfulness, this is a pedagogy we require: that all of us are made aware of what happened so that we are all led to act so that it is not allowed to happen again.
This was the reason why the General Assembly of the United Nations urged all States to develop educational programmes that conveyed the lessons of the Holocaust to the new generations.
Allow me to remember a lesson which we inherited from the great book of rabbinical knowledge, the Talmud: the most powerful of all is not the one that destroys his enemy, but the one that makes a friend out of an enemy.
When this lesson, true at all times and to all men, is really learnt, we will reach abundant peace and welfare for us all and for the People of Israel, as promised in the prayer we have just shared.
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