Formal Opening Ceremony of Holocaust Exhibition to be Held at United Nations Headquarters, 25 January

A formal opening ceremony for the exhibition “Holocaust by Bullets” will be held at 6 p.m. on Monday, 25 January, in the Visitors’ Lobby (Gallery A) at United Nations Headquarters in New York.

The exhibition is part of a week-long series of Holocaust remembrance activities at the United Nations.  The International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust is 27 January and the theme of this year’s observance is “The Holocaust and Human Dignity”.

The exhibition presents photographic evidence and testimonies from eyewitnesses to the mass killing of Jews that started before the creation of concentration camps in Eastern Europe, and continued until the end of the Second World War.  This form of genocide is less well known.  And yet, it is estimated that between 1941 and 1944 more than 2 million Jews were killed this way — locally, in broad daylight — when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.  The content of the exhibition is provided by Yahad-In Unum, a non-profit organization whose mission is to uncover and document these mass grave sites in Eastern Europe.

The exhibition, which opened on 7 January and will be on display through 12 February, is presented and endorsed by the Permanent Mission of France to the United Nations.

Cristina Gallach, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, will welcome guests to the exhibit’s opening ceremony, which will include remarks by François Delattre, Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations; and by Father Patrick Desbois, President of Yahad-In Unum.

Holocaust remembrance activities at the United Nations are led by the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme of the Department of Public Information.  The programme, as established by General Assembly resolution 60/7, was developed to encourage Holocaust education and remembrance in order to help prevent future acts of genocide.  For more information, please contact Kimberly Mann at e-mail:  mann@un.org; or visit www.un.org/holocaustremembrance.

The Visitors’ Lobby is open to the public Mondays through Fridays in January and February from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.  A Government-issued photo identification is required.

For more information on United Nations exhibitions, please contact Renata Morteo at tel.: +1 212 963 5455, or e-mail:  morteo@un.org.