Holocaust remembrance; designation.

(1) The legislature recognizes that the horrors of the Holocaust should never be forgotten. The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. In addition to the murder of some 6,000,000 Jews, millions more, including the handicapped, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, prisoners of war, and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny. (2) A key date in the history of the Holocaust is April 19, 1943, the beginning of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, when Jews, using homemade bombs and stolen or bartered weapons, resisted death camp deportation by the Nazis for 27 days. This date, which in the Hebrew calendar is the twenty-seventh day of Nisan, has been established by the United States congress as a national Holocaust remembrance day, and the week surrounding this date has been established as the Days of Remembrance. (3) The legislature declares that the twenty-seventh day of the month of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar shall be Holocaust remembrance day, and that the period beginning on the Sunday before that day through the following Sunday shall be the Days of Remembrance in this state, in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, and in honor of the survivors, as well as the rescuers and liberators.