A two-day International Conference on Genocide opened here Wednesday, attended by more than 700 people.
The conference, sponsored in part by the Russian Ministry of Culture, was organized by the Moscow Jewish Cultural and Educational Society.
It was more than five years in the making because of bureaucratic snags. Although life changed significantly in the former Soviet Union during those years, many participants saw little difference between contemporary groups such as Pamyat, which scrawls “Death to all Jews” on walls, and those that spread their messages of hate earlier in the century.
In addition to panel discussions, the conference featured an exhibition of photographs borrowed from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, depicting life in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the dedication of a memorial in honor of the dead.
The group’s goal is to attract the attention of Russian society, a spokesman said, because it is time the silence on the tragedy was broken.
The opening speeches by various community leaders recalled the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust and the countless millions never born as a result. They talked about the historical burden and responsibility of being Jewish because of what they called the “disease of anti-Semitism.”
Many people perished in World War II, but it was “only the Jews who died for no other reason than they were Jewish,” said Yuri Sokol, president of the cultural society.
“Fifty years ago there was a physical genocide. Now, there is a spiritual one,” he added. What most upset many of the elderly members of the audience was the lack of knowledge by today’s youth of the tragedy that took place 50 years ago.
The conference continued Wednesday night at the Jewish Chamber Music Theater at Taganskaya, with a memorial dedication in memory of the 6 million Holocaust victims.
Other sponsors of the event were the Russian Scientific and Educational Center of the Holocaust; the Russian Association of Jewish War Veterans, Partisans, and Prisoners of Concentration Camps and Ghettos; and the Israeli Fund for Education and Culture in the Diaspora.
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