[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 31, Number 18 (Monday, May 8, 1995)]
[Pages 737-739]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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

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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.
    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.

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    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.