International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Culture of origin: International · International

Holiday sources: Israel · Judaism

The UN General Assembly created the day with resolution 60/7 of 1 November 2005, choosing 27 January, the day the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz camp in 1945; it was first observed in 2006. The resolution rejects any denial of the Holocaust as an event. In December 2006 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government hosted a Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran, organized by the foreign ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies, whose speakers included the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and the convicted French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. The United Nations was among those who condemned it; Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that denying the Holocaust "is just not acceptable".