On April the 20th, on the eve of the Holocaust Memorial day, the session of the historical club of Hesed "Astana" dedicated to one of the worst dates in the destiny of the Jewish people took place. The head of the club and "Jewish tradition" programme coordinator Michail Krejchman spoke about this tragedy.

In the end of 1942 the first news about massacre of Jews in Europe began to reach Yeshiva. Jews' murders by the storm troopers happened earlier but the world still did not know about the Nazi programme, the purpose of which was the killing of all our people, and about extent of this disaster.

During the Holocaust about 6 million Jews were exterminated in Europe. Their destruction was named "the final solution of Jewish problem" by the German bureaucracy. And it was solved in the ghettos, the concentration camps, during the marches of death and the mass shootings. The Jews were not the only victims of extermination; more than 50 million people were killed during the WWII. However, only Jews and Gypsies were destroyed for their ethnicity. Destruction of Jews was the consequence of the German ideology of racial anti-Semitism and was of such significance for the Nazi regime that even military success was sometimes sacrificed for the sake of it.

The Holocaust of European Jews was the worst disaster in the history of our people. By the beginning of the war more than 9 million Jews lived in Europe and three quarters of them (about half of the world’s Jewish population) were concentrated in the East. Destruction of these innocent people was Hitler's purpose. And today this tragedy evokes enormous pain in our hearts.

Michael Kreychman