Public Affairs Officer Orly Keiner's Remarks at Ceremonies to Dedicate Holocaust Victims Memorials in the Towns of Kopyl and Nesvizh

July 26, 2010

Dear friends!

I am pleased to be here today with you to collectively honor the memories of the 3,000 Jews who were killed here by the Nazis. 

The monument serves to remind us all of one aspect of the many great losses that Belarus suffered during the Great Patriotic War.  Not only did the country lose a third of its total population to the Nazi war machine, but it suffered the loss of approximately a million of its Jewish population.  The great contributions of Belarus’ Jews to the music, art, and culture of this country are well known, and the slaughter of the region’s Jews was an unspeakable loss for this country and the world.

This monument has some personal significance for me as well.  My grandfather, a Jew from a village in the Lyuban region, left Belarus with his family 15 years before the Nazi invasion.  I sometimes fear to think that he would have been among the millions of victims had he remained here.  The gratefulness that I feel for my grandfather’s escape sharpens the pain that I feel when I think of the fate of many of those Jews who remained here.   It is important for me to be here to honor their memory.
 
I would like to thank the local residents and authorities, the local Jewish communities and organizations, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, American families of Kletters and Geislers, and the British Simon Mark Lazarus Foundation for their work in creating this important monument.  May it serve to remind us and generations to come of those who were lost in that terrible war and of the resilience of the Jewish people.