International Holocaust Remembrance Day

If the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet to warn the people and the sword comes and takes someone’s life, that person’s life will be taken because of their sin, but I will hold the watchman accountable for their blood. Ezekiel 33:6
 

During World War II, the Nazi regime systematically imprisoned, tortured, and murdered approximately six million Jews – including a million children –  along with many others they deemed undesirables, throughout Central Europe. The atrocities are well-documented in documentary films, history books, eyewitness accounts, as well as at Holocaust museums and memorials in Israel, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. Yet there are individuals and even world leaders that vehemently deny that such events ever took place.

The most recent and visible is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called the Holocaust a myth, a lie, a deception, and an unreliable claim. Yet even as he denies the first Holocaust happened, he and his regime are planning for a second Holocaust. He has called for the annihilation of Israel. His regime is building ballistic missiles, developing nuclear weapons, building strategic alliances to surround the Jewish State, and doing everything it can to isolate and delegitimize Israel and the Jewish people in the international community. In the 1930s, a new evil rose in Germany. Today, a new evil is rising in Iran. Will we forget the lessons of history? Will we ignore what happened once and do nothing to prevent history from repeating itself?

Today, January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by the United Nations in 2005 as an annual day of commemoration. The date is significant because it marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi death camps. On behalf of The Joshua Fund team, I encourage you to take a moment to reflect on the horror of those days, the unsettling fact that anti-Semitism still exists, and to turn your heart to the Lord on this day.

• Please pray for the Lord to bless the nation of Israel and the Jewish people as never before in history – physically, emotionally, economically, and, most of all, spiritually.
   
• Please pray for the Lord to bless, comfort, and shower His unfailing love and mercy on the 240,000 Holocaust survivors who currently live in Israel, 40 percent of whom live in poverty.
   
• Please pray that The Joshua Fund and other Christian organizations are able to care for even more of these dear people, to provide food and other relief aid to more of these survivors in 2011 than ever before, to visit more of them, encourage them, and pray for them in the latter years of their lives.
   
• Please pray that in 2011 followers of Jesus Christ around the world will heed the words of the Lord through the Hebrew prophet Isaiah “to bring the good news to the afflicted…to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to captives and freedom to prisoners, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord…to comfort all who mourn…so that they will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified” (Isaiah 61:1-3).
   
• Please pray that The Joshua Fund and evangelical Christian leaders, organizations and individuals around the world would be faithful as “watchmen on the wall,” just as the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel instructed us – that we would be faithful in educating Christians about God’s love and plan for Israel and the Jewish people, educating Christians about the evils that are rising and the threats that are growing in the Middle East, and mobilizing Christians to pray faithfully for Israel and her neighbors in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, especially as He prepares to come back soon.
   
• Please pray for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and enemies of Israel in Iran and throughout the Middle East that the Lord would change their hearts and save their souls as well.
   
• Please pray for the peace of Jerusalem and for peace for all the nations of the epicenter, just as King David commanded us in Psalm 122:6.

To read more about International Holocaust Remembrance Day, please click here.

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