Press Releases

WASHINGTON — Today, Speaker Johnson delivered an address at the Days of Remembrance Ceremony. The event is hosted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and is America’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust.

Click here to watch Speaker Johnson’s remarks

“Several weeks ago, Congress overwhelmingly passed security assistance to Israel to help protect its borders. We did it, and we did it together to help Israel fend off threats from Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah and all the proxies,” Speaker Johnson said. “The reason that act was so significant, the reason our vote was so important was because as a Congress together, we sent a message. We bore witness to the past and told the world: Israel and the Jewish people are not alone, and we kept the promise that we made decades ago: Never Again.”

The event also featured remarks from President Joe Biden, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, U.S. Ambassadors, and Holocaust survivors.

Below is the transcript of Speaker Johnson’s remarks:

Chair Eizenstat, Vice Chair Holt, Mr. Foxman, Director Bloomfield, Leader Jeffries, President Biden – and most importantly, to all our Holocaust survivors… welcome to the United States Capitol. You honor us by your presence here today.

We’re here during the Days of Remembrance and Jewish-American Heritage Month, and on the anniversary of the Nazis unconditional surrender, to remember and to reflect.

As a part of Congress’ mandate fo he Hlocaust Memorial Museum, this event is hosted every year, because memories teach us. As it’s been said, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed of course to repeat it.”

Director Bloomfield has ben leading the museum for over a quarter century, and if you have a chance to go on a tour with her and ask her what keeps her going –she’ll say something like this, and which is a certain truth: Democracy is fragile, we all must remember that, and we’re all capable of falling prey to our worst impulses.

By the turn of the 20th Century, Germany was a thriving democracy. They were on the cutting edge of technology. They had a strong economy and were highly educated. But that did not stop evil and darkness from overtaking that country.

German universities, like those at Strasbourg, were at the heart of the renaissance and intellectual life. But it was at those same elite centers of learning where Jewish faculty and students were expelled, where anti-Jewish courses were introduced, and where professors performed horrific pseudo-science experiments on Jews brought from nearby concentration camps.

We remember what happened then, and today, we are witnessing American universities quickly become hostile places for Jewish students and faculty.

The very campuses which were once the envy of the international academy have succumbed to an antisemitic virus. Students who were known for producing academic papers, are now known for stabbing Jewish peers in the eyes with Palestinian flags.

Faculty who once produced cutting-edge research are linking arms with pro-Hamas protestors calling for a “global intifada.”

Administrators who were once lauded by their peers for leadership are barring Jewish faculty and choosing not to protect their Jewish students. Jewish students are physically threatened when they walk on campus, as their peers hold posters repeating the Nazi propaganda and the program: the final solution.

Now is a time for moral clarity – we must put an end to this madness.

We understand that this rise in antisemitism comes just after the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. With our survivors before us, if you close your eyes, and in the quietness of your heart, you can hear the glass of Jewish storefronts shattered by stormtroopers.

You can see your fathers being executed at point blank in the ghettos.

You can feel your brother’s hand slipping out of your own, as men in uniforms separate them into lines, and you can only mouth to him: everything will be okay – hoping that it would be.

You can hear screams coming from the gas chambers. They last for 20 minutes, and then quiet returns, but only for a moment, until a whip cracks another Jewish back.

The most depraved parts of humanity are heard in the shouts of little girls and seen in the rings of blue smoke. And then you re-open your eyes, hoping the memories of that nightmare will finally go away.

But you are met with images of young Jewish girls gunned down at a music festival. Infants, once held tightly in their mothers’ arms, are thrown into ovens and cooked. Little boys are murdered by men carrying black, red, and green flags.

Elderly women are raped, not by men speaking German, but Arabic. The wail of children pierces through nearby gunfire – a cry that only comes from watching a father being slaughtered. And across Israel, bodies are burned beyond recognition.

Just as in 1940, this violence was perpetrated by those who hate the star of David.

It is uncomfortable for us to be so graphic. But we must be graphic right now because the threat of repeating this past is so great.

We must remember, we must look evil directly in the face because some things are so wrong, some are trying to downplay and justify what happened on October 7^th.

Some are even blaming Israel for these barbaric, inhuman attacks.

There are some who would prefer to criticize Israel and lecture Israel on military tactics, they would rather do that than punish the terrorists who perpetrate these crimes.

In Israel’s greatest moment of need, when it is quite literally fighting for its existence as a nation, we must do everything in our power to ensure that evil does not prevail. This is a time for all of us to come together. And it’s in these troubling times, we must look to this audience – to the survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants – to help us remember and bear witness.

Several weeks ago, Congress overwhelmingly passed security assistance to Israel to help protect its borders. We did it, and we did it together to help Israel fend off threats from Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah and all the proxies. I was proud to pass that package after months of conversations with Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Ambassadors, and all the people there who are trying to defend their nation against the threats they are facing.

And now I think its very important that we deliver that critical assistance without any delay at all.

The reason that act was so significant, the reason our vote was so important was because as a Congress together, we sent a message. We bore witness to the past and told the world: Israel and the Jewish people are not alone, and we kept the promise that we made decades ago: Never Again.

In my hometown of Shreveport, there’s a sweet lady named Rose Van Thyn who bore witness to what she saw in Auschwitz by going into classrooms and teaching kids about the horrors of the holocaust.

With us today is Frank Cohn. He escaped Germany days before Kristallnacht in 1938. Five years later, he was drafted in the U.S. Army and served in Belgium and in Germany to defeat the Nazis and liberate his fellow Jewish brothers and sisters. 

Today, we emulate folks like Rose, Frank and all those in this audience who witnessed the great horrors of the 20th Century and recommit to the decades’ old promise: Never Again.

When our government knew what happening to the Jewish people, when the Axis powers were aligning and invading, we chose to respond only after freedom was lost. Not today. Today, we must act decisively in this moment.

We must teach the next generation, correct those who deny the facts of the Holocaust or October 7th, protect our Jewish students, and give our full-throated, unequivocal support to the nation of Israel.

We must, all of us together, call out antisemitism, without equivocation and without delay. This is our moment.

We meet today, with the memories of October 7th and with the Holocaust in our mind, knowing that democracy is so fragile.

We seek to fulfill God’s command to Moses in Deuteronomy, as it is inscribed in the Holocaust Memorial Museum: “Guard our souls carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart, all the days of your life. “

We must always remember. And we will.