Dear friends, distinguished guests,

The Remembering Hilda Dajč Award is an annual award established in 2022. It is presented every year at the beginning of May, just before May 10, the Remembrance Day for the Holocaust Victims in Belgrade.

The initiative originated from a group of activists from the non-governmental sector, primarily our dear friends from the organization Education for the 21st Century, our organization Terraforming, and a number of other individuals who today make up the Award’s steering committee. I hereby thank them all.

Thank you to everyone who voted and made suggestions for the candidates, and especially thanks to the students of the XIV Belgrade High School who prepared a special program, and who selected this year’s “The Youth Voice” winner with their votes. Special thanks to the representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Serbia, members of the Serbian IHRA delegation, ambassadors and other diplomatic representatives, and representatives of the Jewish community for being with us today. Your support is extremely important to us.

Today, we are witnessing an unprecedented increase in antisemitism throughout the world, which is also reflected in our society in Serbia. We need to work on strengthening capacity and knowledge about antisemitism, which is still insufficient, as we still do not have adequate educational programs for both young people and professionals, such as journalists, museum workers, teachers, police, judiciary, and others.

On the other hand, we also face the abuse and distortion of history, and the practice of abusing the culture of memory to promote fear, hatred, nationalism, and populist political propaganda. In recent times, the concept of genocide has been especially popularized and misused. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance IHRA provides clear definitions and guidelines in the context of the culture of remembrance, including tools for comparing different groups of victims and different crimes, including crimes of genocide and the Holocaust. The Republic of Serbia has endorsed the IHRA working definitions of antisemitism, Holocaust distortion, antigypsyism, and archival records, by a decision of the Government, which is an extraordinary step. In the coming period, I expect that we will work on the promotion of these definitions to relevant institutions and practitioners in the Republic of Serbia, because the definitions, as well as other IHRA materials, are still mostly unknown and unavailable. Only part of the IHRA material is available in Serbian, and it would be necessary to organize special trainings and presentations for relevant actors. This would help to accept and understand that, for example, there are no “genocide nations”, and that such a formulation is not only meaningless but also unacceptable. Instead, it is important to understand that a meaningful culture of remembrance must focus on only two things, which I have often repeated, namely: remembering the victims with respect, as individuals and not as a faceless gray mass with an imposed group identity, and – developing critical thinking and understanding one’s own responsibility to ensure that the crimes committed against the victims are never repeated, primarily by recognizing when we ourselves endanger others.