Brussels, January 26th, 2026 – “The International Holocaust Remembrance Day has a distinctiveness which transcends any political or any ideological divide,” Austrian MEP Lukas Mandl pointed out in a special edition of the European Report. This video discussion was released on Monday as the European Parliament prepares for its Annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony. It takes place in conjunction with the plenary session tomorrow Tuesday, 27th January in the hemicycle of the European Parliament in Brussels.
This year marks 81 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps which put an end to the systematic extermination of six million Jews, representing two third of Europe’s Jewish population alongside the death of millions of others perpetrated by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
In the European Report ECI Founding Director Tomas Sandell reiterated how the European Coalition for Israel initiated and hosted the first ever Holocaust Memorial in the European Parliament already in January 2005. He added that today two other dates are becoming increasingly important to remember, namely October 7, 2023, and May 14, 1948.
October 7 reminds us of the tragic fact that antisemitism has not disappeared despite more than twenty years of Holocaust education but has simply mutated. Today the deadliest form of antisemitism around the world is Islamic Jihadism. This was also the ideological motivation behind the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023, which goes down in history as the single deadliest day for Jews after the Holocaust, he said.
“To organise Holocaust commemoration events on January 27 but not condemn the atrocities of Hamas on October 7 is simply hypocrisy. We should not fall into the trap of feeling pity for dead Jews while ignoring the fate of those Jews who today fight for their survival. Likewise we should not fail to make the connection between January 27,1945 and May 14,1948, the date of the rebirth of the Jewish state. If there had been a Jewish state in 1938, as promised at the San Remo Peace Conference in 1920, millions of more Jews could be alive today,” Tomas Sandell said.
It seems as if many of today’s antisemites can accept individual Jews as long as they are not Zionists and instead disassociate themselves from the State of Israel. This reminds us of the religiously motivated antisemitism in the Middle Ages which could accept Jews only as long as they were willing to convert to Christianity.
“This is not acceptable. The dream of one day returning to Zion, that is Jerusalem, has always been an integral part of Jewish identity. Today we need to be just as appreciative of those Jews who reside among us in Europe as those who make Israel their new home,” Sandell concluded.
United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7 in 2005 designated January 27 as the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. It is each year commemorated at the United Nations in New York as well as in national parliaments and educational institutions around the world. However, new data from the Holocaust Memorial Trust in the UK reveals that the number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day has halved since October 7. It warns that hundreds of schools have stopped commemorations, with teachers increasingly fearful of backlash from parents and pupils.
In Brussels, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day is each year commemorated both by the European Commission and the European Parliament. On January 14, the European Commission co-hosted the Holocaust Remembrance Conference, “Remembering the past, shaping the future”, with the Cypriot Presidency of the Council to honour the victims of the Shoah and to perpetuate the memory of the atrocities committed in Europe during the Second World War.
