BRZEZINKA, Poland — A Jewish leader Tuesday stood before 300 survivors of the Nazis’ most notorious death camp and asked world leaders to prevent another Auschwitz, warning of a rise of anti-Semitism that has made many Jews fearful of walking the streets and is causing many to flee Europe.
Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, made his bleak assessment on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, speaking next to the gate and the railroad tracks that marked the last journey for more than a million people murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
He said his speech was shaped by the recent Islamic terrorist attacks in France that targeted Jews and newspaper satirists.
“For a time, we thought that the hatred of Jews had finally been eradicated. But slowly the demonization of Jews started to come back,” Lauder said. “Once again, young Jewish boys are afraid to wear yarmulkes on the streets of Paris and Budapest and London. Once again, Jewish businesses are targeted. And once again, Jewish families are fleeing Europe.”
The recent attack in Paris, in which four Jews were killed in a kosher supermarket, is not the first deadly attack on Jews in recent years. In May, a shooting killed four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, and in 2012, a rabbi and three children were murdered in the French city of Toulouse.
One Holocaust survivor, Roman Kent, became emotional as he issued a plea to world leaders to remember the atrocities and fight for tolerance.
“We do not want our past to be our children’s future,” the 85-year-old said.
The commemorations also were marked by a melancholy awareness that it will be the last major anniversary that many survivors will be strong enough to attend.
“The survivors are completely gutted that in their lifetime they went through what they went through and that now they are at the end of their life and they don’t know what kind of world they are leaving for their grandchildren,” said Stephen Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation.
