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Russian chief rabbi thanks people for saving Jews from Nazi

Moscow, January 28, Interfax - Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar paid tribute to people who saved Jews from extermination during WWII on the Holocaust Memorial Day.

"I think that on this Holocaust Memorial Day we should recall not only the horrors, the ditches where executed people were thrown into or gas chambers and crematoria, but also the greatest examples of mercy given by righteous members of various peoples," says a Lazar statement received by Interfax-Religion.

"We will never forget the Holocaust tragedy; we will never forget the heroic feat of those who risked their lives to save Holocaust victims. We will never stop thanking them," he said.

Fascism "was a direct result of atheism that spread throughout Germany and some other countries in the first half of the 20th century," he said, adding that the Nazi performed pagan rites and sent rabbis and Christian clerics to concentration camps.

"Militant atheism inevitably caused extensive repressions and genocide everywhere - in Hitler's Germany, in Lenin's and Stalin's Russia, in Pol Pot's Cambodia and now in Myanmar," Lazar said.

However, the righteous men "made their choice despite all the circumstances. They were guided by their spirit not by logic," he said.

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