Yazidis and Kurds visit Yad Vashem memorial

 A mass grave on Mount Sinjar (Photo: Seth Frantzman)

A group of Yazidi and Kurdish representatives visited the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem this week. They were attending a conference dedicated to providing a platform for persecuted minorities. The Jerusalem Post reports: 

The black-and-white images at one display at Yad
Vashem’s Holocaust museum in Jerusalem show women survivors of the
Volary death march who married and raised families.

The guide
emphasized the desire to continue living that survivors had in the wake
of the Nazi genocide, even as they lived crammed into displaced
persons’ camps after the war.

For
the Yazidi and Kurdish delegation touring the museum these were
stories that rang true back home in Iraqi Kurdistan where some 300,000
Yazidis have become refugees from persecution by Islamic State.

For the six visitors, the traumatic experience on Sunday of
walking through the cement-shrouded museum seeing displays of Nazi
brutality was jarring. The group had come to take part in a multiday
conference this week at the capital’s Mishkenot Sha’ananim hosted by
the Spring of Hope Foundation and dedicated to providing a platform for
the voices of persecuted religious and ethnic minorities. The
delegation included Sherzad Mamsani, the director of Jewish affairs for
the Kurdistan Regional Government, Saeed Khudeda Alo, a lecturer at
the University of Duhok, and Khaleel al-Dakhi, a Yazidi lawyer and
activist who has helped rescue people from ISIS slavery.

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