By COLlive reporter
The 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Auschwitz, Poland, was commemorated with a solemn ceremony on Monday.
The Nazi regime and its local collaborators murdered 6 million Jews from all over Europe, annihilating two-thirds of Europe’s Jews and one-third of all Jews worldwide.
In 2005, the United Nations designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Polish television produced the event, which included testimonies by Auschwitz survivors Janina Iwanska, Tova Friedman, and Loen Weintraub.
Participants gathered in a vast tent, where centrally positioned at the main entrance was a freight train car memorializing the 420,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz.
The heads of state who attended included Britain’s King Charles III, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, French President Emmanuel Macron, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Polish President Andrzej Duda, and others.
Representing U.S. President Donald Trump were Steve Witkoff, U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East, Howard Lutnick, nominee for Secretary of Commerce, and Charles Kushner, United States Ambassador to France nominee.
Ronald Lauder, philanthropist and head of the World Jewish Congress, called on the leaders gathered to oppose antisemitism, saying it was “the world’s silence that led to Auschwitz,” according to the AP.
“When the Red Army entered these gates, the world finally saw where the step-by-step progression of antisemitism leads. It leads right here. The gas chambers. The piles of bodies. All the horrors within these gates,” he said.
Lauder also said that while Adolf Hitler’s first targets were Jews, by the time World War II was over, “more than 60 million human beings were dead, and this continent lay in ruins.”
The event featured a delegation of rabbis from various countries. Rabbi Shalom Ber Stambler, Director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Poland, blew the shofar while Holocaust survivor and former Chief Rabbi of Israel Yisrael Meir Lau recited Kaddish in memory of all who perished.
Joining the delegation from Ukraine were Kyiv Rabbi Yonatan Markovitch and Rabbi Raphael Rutman, Vice Chairman of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine (FJCU).
Rabbi Rutman traveled with the presidential delegation via an armored overnight train from Ukraine to Krakow in southern Poland, COLlive has learned.
In a notable display of kiddush Hashem, Rabbi Rutman conducted a tefillin campaign, helping Jewish members of various national delegations fulfill the mitzvah by helping them put on tefillin.
VIDEO: 80th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz (viewer discretion advised)
A day before in Kyiv, KYIV, President Zelenskyy participated in an intimate ceremony at Babyn Yar remembering the many Jews who were murdered there.
He was joined by Rabbi Rutman and Rabbi Mayer Stambler of the FJCU, and Shluchim Rabbi Pinchas Vishedski, Rabbi Mordechai Levenhartz, and Rabbi Sholom Gopin.
The Chief Rabbi of Great Britain was there as well, as he is very close to King Charles III