Ahead of Slovakia’s annual National Remembrance Day to be held on Friday, this week the Israeli Embassy there held a ceremony honoring Slovakian Righteous Among the Nations where it awarded six coins and certificates to six families who risked their lives saving persecuted Jews during the Holocaust.
About 70 thousand Jews were murdered out of the 89,000 who lived in the country before the outbreak of World War II. The date September 9 marks the day in 1941 Joseph Tissot’s collaborationist government adopted a series of harsh measures against the Jewish community that were enacted in the Jewish Codex, similar to Germany’s Nuremberg Laws.
At the ceremony, Slovakia’s Prime Minister thanked the State of Israel for awarding the certificates to the “Hasids” and thanked the families who saved lives. He said that the brutal behavior that happened in the history of the Slovak people must not be repeated.
