The European Parliament will mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a virtual ceremony, 76 years after the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp was liberated on 27 January 1945. You can follow the ceremony live here.
The ceremony will be opened at 10.00 with a speech by the President of the European Parliament David Sassoli and a performance of traditional Yiddish songs by Gilles Sadowsky (clarinet) and Hanna Bardos (voice).
This will be followed by remote speeches from the President of the Conference of European Rabbis, Chief Rabbi of Moscow, Mr Pinchas Goldschmidt and from Mr Gyula Sárközi, dancer, choreographer and representative of the Roma community.
The commemoration will conclude with a minute of silence in honour of the victims of the Holocaust and the prayer El Maleh Rahamim, recited by Israel Muller, Chief Cantor of the Great Synagogue of Europe in Brussels.
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Pinchas Goldschmidt (born 21 July 1963 in Zurich/Switzerland) has been the Chief Rabbi of Moscow since 1993, serving at the Moscow Choral Synagogue. He also founded and has been the head of the Moscow Rabbinical Court of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) since 1989. Since 20011, he has served as President of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), which unites over seven hundred communal rabbis from Dublin to Khabarovsk.
Gyula Sárközi (born 12 January 1962 in Budapest/Hungary) is a dancer, ballet master and choreographer as well as founder of the Madách School of Musical Dance and Vocational High School. From 1982 to 2009, he worked at the Hungarian State Opera House as soloist and ballet master. In 2001, he founded the Madách School with the aim of training professional musical dancers. Coming from a poor Roma family, Mr Sárközi considers it important to support disadvantaged children in their education.
