    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
    [April 30, 1995]
    [Pages 613-614]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in
    New York City
    April 30, 1995

        Foreign Minister Peres, thank you for your powerful words, the
    example of your life, and your tireless work for peace. Rabbi Lau,
    Governor Pataki, Senator Moynihan, Senator D'Amato, members of the New
    York congressional delegation, Speaker Silver, Ambassador Rabinovich and
    members of the Diplomatic Corps, Mr. Mayor, and of course, my friend
    Benjamin Meed. I thank you and your wife for joining us and helping
    Hillary and me and, through us, the entire United States last year to
    understand the deepest and profoundest meaning of the Warsaw Uprising.
        This year we mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust.
    Since Biblical times, 50th anniversaries have had special meanings. Our
    English word ``jubilee'' comes to us from the Hebrew word for that
    anniversary. And the Scripture tells us that every 50th year is to be
    holy and the land should be left fallow and slaves freed upon the
    blowing of a shofar. It was a year in the Scriptures that closed an era
    and began another.
        We think of such things here on the end of this century and the
    beginning of a new millennium, but in profound ways there can be no such
    closure for the half-century after the Holocaust. For all of those who
    lived through it and all of us who came after, the Holocaust redefined
    our understanding of the human capacity for evil. Anyone who has stood
    in that tower of photographs in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in
    Washington, who has seen those unforgettable, warm, expressive faces
    from that small Lithuanian town, anyone who has seen the horror even in
    pictures knows that we must now and never allow the memory of those
    events to fade.
        The Bible also made the link between memory and deed, enjoining us
    so often to remember the years of slavery in Egypt and the acts of the
    wicked and then to act morally. Today we must remember those years of
    radical evil as though it were a commandment to do so because, as we
    have seen, hatred still flourishes where it has a chance. Intolerance
    still lurks, waiting to spread. Racist violence still threatens abroad
    and at home.
        We are taught in our faith that as much as we might regret it, deep
    within the human spirit there is, and will always remain until the end
    of time, the capacity for evil. It must be remembered, and it must be
    opposed.
        The commandment to remember is especially great now because, as the
    Foreign Minister said, this has been a very bloody century. And soon,
    the living memory of the Holocaust will pass. Those of us, then, who
    were born after the war will then have to shoulder the responsibility
    that the survivors have carried for so long: to fight all forms of
    racism, to combat those who distort the past and peddle hate in the
    present, to stand against the new forms of organized evil and counter
    their determination to use and to abuse the modern miracles of
    technology and openness and possibility that offer us the opportunity to
    build for our children the most remarkable world ever known but still
    carry, within these forces, the seeds of further destruction.

    [[Page 614]]

        I have hope for the future because our Americans are embracing the
    responsibility of memory. In the 2 years since the Holocaust Memorial
    Museum opened, more than 4 million people--more, many more than were
    expected--have visited that remarkable place. The daily number of
    visitors is still increasing, and about 8 of every 10 Americans who
    visit are not Jews. Twenty thousand school groups have been there
    already, and with the help of the museum, some 40,000 teachers around
    our country now teach about the Holocaust in their classes. Perhaps
    those children one day will be the kind of adults who would stop and ask
    why and do more if someone ever came to take a friend or a neighbor
    away.
        If so, we will have been true to the memory of the victims of the
    Holocaust, and we will have pressed the cause of decency and human
    dignity yet one more step forward. This is our task: making memory real
    and making memory a guide for our own actions.
        I am reminded of the extraordinary visit I had last year to the Old
    Jewish Cemetery in Prague, that great forest of stones. As you know,
    everyone who visits there, or any Jewish cemetery, puts a stone on a
    grave, adding to memory, never subtracting from it. For me, someone new
    to the experience, it was an overwhelming symbol of how we all ought to
    think and live.
        Over the centuries, memory has been built there in Prague in a very
    deep and profound way, in the city that Hitler wanted to turn into a
    museum for what he hoped would be an extinct people. We, too, now must
    add to those stones, stones of remembrance, like this day-long
    gathering, stones that add to the memory of the victims and to our
    knowledge of the barbarism that claimed them.
        Ultimately, I wanted to be here today, after all our country has
    been through in these last days, because you have taught me that the
    vigilance of memory is our greatest defense, and I thank you all for
    that.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:35 p.m. at Madison Square Garden. In his
    remarks, he referred to Foreign Minister Shimon Peres of Israel; Rabbi
    Yisrael Meir Lau, chief Rabbi of the Ashkenazic Jews of Israel; Gov.
    George E. Pataki of New York; Sheldon Silver, New York State House
    speaker; Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York City; and Benjamin Meed,
    president, American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, and his
    wife, Vladka.