The Interdenominational Church of the Holy Lands Remembers 60th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

God created man in His own image. Man is limitless in variety. He is formed in many shades and sizes, but he is still the same human creation of God, and those who lay claim to superiority in any form or kind, surely do not recognise God as the creator of all people.

The holocaust teaches us that pure hatred, evil and insanity guised as political ideology had, as its very end, men women and children burned, gassed, experimented on and tortured in ways we dare not think. For five and a half years, 3000 Jews were murdered every single day by an unrelenting evil that did not discriminate between a baby or an old man, evil without conscience that defined a whole race as so subhuman, it could be humiliated and annihilated in the most crudest of ways, an evil whose perpetrators did not pause for breath long enough to question the morality and the insanity of its crimes, crimes against people, crimes against God.

The holocaust teaches us about the depths that man is capable of.

Archbishop Gary Beaver stated that “It is the duty of every human being to think deeply about their actions. Anything styled to focus negatively on differences such as race, creed, or colour from play ground bullying to “sophisticated” bigotry, must not be tolerated. Little seeds of hate, on fertile ground can grow and choke all that is good”

In remembering the Shoah, we must as Christians remember and understand the Jewish roots of our faith, and build relations without man made boundaries, relationships that will withstand any form of prejudice and intolerance.