Historic Statement Today at Yad Vashem: EEA and IHRA Definition of Antisemitism

April 26, 2022 – Reverend Connie Duarte, EEA Board Member and designated Secretary General, together with Reverend Dr. Frank Hinkelmann, EEA President, have read the following statement during the ceremony in Yad Vashem’s synagogue:

This is a moment of utmost importance to the European Evangelical Alliance. After having visited Yad Vashem today, we had the privilege to hold a commemoration ceremony in the hall of remembrance together with our friends of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, with whom members of the global Evangelical Community have been engaged in a dialogue for several years. During the ceremony we laid down a wreath stating: “In awe and profound shame, yet with the promise for future solidarity – European Evangelical Alliance”.

In 2022, 80 years after Adolf Hitler declared his ‘final solution’ at the Wannsee Conference in Germany, we declare our adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, including all examples. And we do so without qualification or exemption.

We do so as an integral part and one of the regions of the World Evangelical Alliance, against the specific historical background that the Holocaust took place in Europe. We also do so in emphasizing that antisemitism in various forms and facets has today become a global threat. It poisons societies and Christian-Jewish relations around the globe, even in nations where there are no Jews.

We have specifically chosen this time – the very week in which commemoration ceremonies on the occasion of Yom HaShoah are taking place here in Jerusalem and around the world – and place – in this synagogue at Yad Vashem, the global home of Holocaust remembrance – to emphasize an important aspect: the IHRA working definition’s context and origin lies with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. We second what the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (ISGAP) has stated in its support statement of the IHRA definition: “Holocaust remembrance is not about recollection, recall, or reporting the events surrounding the extermination of the Jews of Europe. No, it is about engaging in a testimony to the sanctity of the other human being and our infinite responsibility to and for the other human being. This testimony is rooted in the millennial teaching and testimony that comes to the world through the Jewish people. That millennial tradition is precisely what the Nazis targeted for annihilation and what the antisemites, including the anti-Zionists, seek to obliterate.”