PULLMAN, Wash.–The Holocaust Awareness Day Presentation, a community statement against hatred and intolerance, is scheduled for Monday at 6 p.m. in the Pullman High School.
Pullman Mayor Mitch Chandler proclaimed Monday Holocaust Awareness Day in response to an announcement that David Irving, a revisionist historian challenging the Holocaust, would speak on the Washington State University campus Monday evening.
The Awareness Day event is sponsored by the Pullman Livability Task Force, which includes representatives of the university, the City of Pullman, the Pullman School District and the Pullman Chamber of Commerce. Other sponsors are the Latah County Human Rights Commission and the citizens’ group Building Community Through Diversity.
Speakers at the program will include Alan Rose, a University of Idaho professor whose family relatives were Holocaust victims; Lilo Dumin of Moscow, a Holocaust survivor; Jerry Harms, a Pullman school teacher whose social studies classes cover the history of the Nazi program of genocide; and Joan Montagnes, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Palouse. Moderating the event will be Linda Pall, a Moscow city council member and a WSU instructor.
A member of the Livability Task Force, Marcia Garrett of WSU, who helped organize the program, said the presentation is the result of spontaneous responses from people throughout the community. “Many of us felt the need to come together and make a public statement that messages of intolerance are unacceptable in our community. We want it known there will be no complicity of silence with those who express hate in any form,” she said.
The Holocaust was a horrific occurrence in the history of human events, and we must not remove it from our public consciousness, she said.
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