For Immediate Release
April 24, 2017

Holocaust Days Of Remembrance Week at The Center For Social Justice & Human Understanding

The Suffolk Community College Center for Social Justice & Human Understanding (CSJHU) will honor the victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution by participating in a national campaign shared across all three of the College’s campuses. The campaign from April 23-30, coincides with the annual commemoration of the Holocaust established by Congress and led by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

The Days of Remembrance Paperclip campaign is a grass-roots effort to honor the victims of the Holocaust and to state visibly, by the gesture of wearing a paperclip, that we support equality and respect for everyone. During World War II, Norwegians wore paperclips on their clothes to demonstrate their opposition to Nazism and anti-Semitism. According to sources, the first mass outbreak of civil disobedience occurred in the autumn of 1940, when Oslo University students wore paperclips on their lapels to demonstrate opposition to the German occupiers and to their Norwegian collaborators.

The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims—six million were murdered; Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), people with mental and physical disabilities, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi Germany.

Through our Days of Remembrance Paperclip Campaign, CSJHU seeks both to commemorate this tragic history and to reflect on the lessons it holds for our lives today. We also pay tribute to the rescuers who risked their lives to save others during the Holocaust and to the American soldiers who liberated the concentration camps.

Rabbi Steven Moss, CSJHU Board Chair explained, “Why should we continue to remember the Holocaust all of these years later? It needs to be remembered because not only can it happen again but genocide is happening now throughout the world. The nations of the world must be made to see the horrors of genocide in order to stop it and prevent it. The Holocaust must also be seen as the ultimate act of hatred perpetrated by a nation against others and therefore any act or word of hate must be seen in this light and also pointed out and stopped. We through the Center along with other agencies, organizations and law enforcement must be proactive and reactive so that the words "Never Again" ring true.”

To learn more about the Center for Social Justice & Human Understanding: Featuring the Holocaust exhibit, visit our website at http://chdhu.org. To learn more about Days of Remembrance, including the national ceremony in the US Capitol Rotunda and a map of remembrance events around the country, visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website at www.ushmm.org/remember.