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Yom HaShoah: Commemorating the Jewish Victims of the Holocaust

Photo: Wikimedia Creative Commons
A lit Yom Hashoah candle in a dark room.

The atrocities of the Holocaust are the focus of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day in late January, but the observation of Yom HaShoah in late April is a date on the Jewish calendar set aside specifically to remember the nearly 6 million Jewish victims of the Nazis and their collaborators. 

Monday at 1 p.m. on Gulf Coast Live, Renee Beddouck, a Holocaust survivor and docent of the Holocaust Museum of Southwest Florida, shares her story of surviving the Nazi campaign of mass murder by fleeing Paris and hiding with a gentile family in the French countryside before coming to the United States after the war.

Also joining the conversation is Jessica Evers, a history professor with FGCU's Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, about her ongoing research and insight new information about when the world knew about the genocide of the Nazis.

Rabbi Bruce Diamond of the Fort Myers Community Free Synagogue also joins the show to share his perspective on how the day of remembrance is observed in the United States and in the Jewish communities of Southwest Florida.

Matthew Smith is a reporter and producer of WGCU’s Gulf Coast Live.