Dafna Michaelson Jenet, left, and Emily Sirota
News was received at press time that the bill mandating Holocaust education in Colorado’s public schools was passed unanimously in the Colorado State Senate on Wednesday, June 10.
House Bill 1336, which directs the Colorado Board of Education to adopt learning standards for Holocaust education by July 1, 2021, and for school districts to implement their genocide curriculum by the 2023-2024 school year, was introduced in the Colorado legislature in March.
It passed unanimously in the House of Representatives last week.
The bill’s sponsors in the House were Reps. Dafna Michaelson Jenet and Emily Sirota, both Democrats. In the Senate, Senators Stephen Fenberg (Democrat) and Dennis Hisey (Republican) sponsored the bill.
On Facebook on Wednesday, Sirota thanked some 25 organizations and individuals, from both the Jewish and general communities, “whose promise of financial support kept HB20-1336 viable in the midst of a budget crisis.
“Today we ensured ‘Never Again’ is more than a slogan, but a collective social practice in our state.”
The bill now advances to the desk of Governor Jared Polis, whose signature is expected.
Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News
This is an excellent accomplishment in combating the Holocaust deniers, whose agenda is to hide the truth, and continue hurting even more so those who have suffered or lost loved ones from it. The ‘Never Again’ that the Nuremberg trials tried to establish and set as a standard, that has recurred over and over again, and even in the very heart of Europe itself. The brutal horrors that occurred with the Jews during WW-2 is currently ongoing in China today, and has been for years. The Chinese have their concentration camps what they call their ‘Reeducation Centers’ and they are currently involved with other crimes against humanity such as people arrested and never heard from again, and there is also evidence that some of their undesirables have been used for body organs for medical transplants.
So why is it that most Americans know very little about these horrible realities going on, and most people, even our government leaders, they are not up in arms or even concerned about it? Could it be that we have very strong economic ties with China, and they have become a very powerful and dangerous nation, or could it be that these Chinese are considered as some primitive people, like many Europeans thought so lowly of the Jews around WW-2? Or is it possible that these horrors are simply not in our backyards yet, and hopefully they will never be in our homes.