Holocaust Remembrance Day

There are two annual days of Holocaust remembrance.

1. International Holocaust Remembrance Day, is an international memorial day on 27 January commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, the genocidal murder of an estimated 6 million Jews, 2 million Roma, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The date was chosen to mark the liberation, on January 27 1945, of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp.

2. The Jewish holiday of Yom HaShoah ( Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day) is a national day of commemoration in Israel, on which the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and the Jewish resistance to the Nazis are memorialized. Yom HaShoah 2016 begins in the evening of Wednesday, May 4 and ends in the evening of Thursday, May 5.The original proposal was to hold Yom HaShoah on the 14th of the Hebrew month of Nisan, the date of the Warsaw ghetto uprising (April 19, 1943), but this was problematic because the 14th of Nisan is the day immediately before Passover. The date was therefore moved to the 27th of Nisan, which is eight days before Yom Ha'atzma'ut,(Israeli Independence Day)

Educational resources for both observances are available at Holocaust Information