On May 02, Dnipro joined the commemoration ceremony Yom HaShoah (The Day of the Catastrophe and the heroism of European Jewry). Thanks to «Nativ» Israeli Cultural Center and its head, Viacheslav Smotkin, second secretary of Embassy of Israel in Ukraine, Dnipro Jewish Community and its rabbi Shmuel Kaminetskyi, representatives of other Jewish organizations, schoolchildren of 144 school, and ordinary citizens, the memory of the 6 million victims of the Nazi genocide was honored in Dnipro.

Shmuel Kaminetskyi, chief rabbi of Dnipro and region stressed that, despite the real catastrophe survived by the Jewish communities of Ukraine during the German occupation, Jewish life in modern Ukraine continues. Fear of the Jewish origin, generated by Nazi terror, Soviet anti-Semitism retreats, and already young generations of independent Ukraine citizens are proud of their Jewish roots, traditions, faith, etc.

Raffael Heltzer, head of «Sohnut-Ukraine», stressed that this memorable day, as well as the very fact of the State of Israel establishment and existence, is a clear indication of the Nazis and their followers plans defeat.

Dr. Yehor Vradii, deputy director of the Museum «Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine» noted the importance of understanding the human dimension of the Catastrophe, human lives are hidden behind numbers, therefore unique worlds destroyed by German totalitarianism. It is equally important that this Day is a time of honoring the Jews who fought Nazism – rebels of the Tuchin ghetto in Volhynia, who first confronted the Nazis and their followers almost without any weapons in the autumn of 1942 in the occupied territories; Ukrainian Jew Oleksandr Pecherskyi and his comrades – Sobibor death camp prisoners, who did impossible things. In 1943, they raised the uprising on the Nazi's «death factory» and rescued hundreds of other’s people lives. This list can be continued. The memory of these people is extremely important, because it denies so far the prevalent myths about the Jews obedience to their destiny and their non-resistance to the absolute evil, which Nazism was.

With bated breath, all the ceremony participants listened to Asya (Ester) Shtern words, who in 1939 lived with her mother in Warsaw and, like hundreds of thousands of other Jews, was taken to the ghetto. Only thanks to the happy event and the help of Polish friends, she had the opportunity to illegally cross the border between the German and Soviet occupation zones and in such a way to save her life. However, still a 93-year-old woman remembers the atmosphere of fear, which prevailed among Jews of the city immediately after the Nazi rule establishment.

The number of people who took the time to honor the memory of the victims of the Disaster, as well as the young people's share of the present, are striking and hope that the ideas of the value of human life, mutual respect regardless of religious, ethnic or racial identity will not lose their relevance and will be moral safeguards for the tragedies that mankind has endured in the XX century.