NEW YORK—The World Jewish Congress mourns the passing of Prof. Yehuda Bauer, the pioneering Holocaust historian, who passed away on October 18, 2024, at age 98 and was laid to rest in Kibbutz Shoval in the Negev. Long associated with Yad Vashem and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Bauer was the author of voluminous literature on the Shoah and antisemitism. He was also one of the founders of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). In 2018, the WJC awarded him its coveted Nahum Goldmann Award.
Recalling the great scholar and his manifold contributions to our knowledge, WJC President Ronald S. Lauder said: "I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Prof. Yehuda Bauer, who taught generations of students and others about the Holocaust. I will never forget our last discussions at the International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism in Malmö, Sweden, in October 2021 and the passionate speech he gave on that occasion." Addressing that gathering, Bauer described antisemitism as "an extreme case of a general human disease. [It] is not a Jewish illness, though the Jews are the obvious first victims. Antisemitism is a cancer in the body politic of the world’s societies.”
WJC’s Israel Representative, Dr. Laurence Weinbaum, described Bauer as "the doyen of Holocaust scholarship and as a man of peerless intellect, whose commitment to chronicling contemporary history, however excruciating, was relentless. Yehuda began his quest at a time when the Holocaust was still a festering wound and few scholars were writing about it. A mesmerizing, iconoclastic lecturer and a meticulous researcher, Yehuda's brilliance stood in inverse proportion to his ego. Those privileged to have known him will never forget his kindness, compassion, and self-effacing wit. May his memory be a blessing and an unremitting source of inspiration.”
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