A Holocaust Remembrance Day program will be held on Tuesday, April 18 at 2 p.m. at Fort Ontario State Historic Site in Oswego, located at 1 E. Fourth St.

The program, co-sponsored by NYS Parks and the Safe Haven Holocaust Refugee Shelter Museum, will be held outside at the granite monument dedicated to the 1,000 Holocaust refugees brought to Fort Ontario by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) on August 5, 1944. The monument is located by the post cemetery overlooking Lake Ontario.

In case of inclement weather, activities will be moved inside the old stone fortification. No admission will be charged.

Holocaust Remembrance Day seeks to commemorate the Holocaust, a systematic and state-planned program by Nazi-Germany to murder millions of Jews and other minority groups in Europe. Known collectively in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day honors the strength and courage of refugees and encourages public awareness and support of refugees: people who have had to flee their homelands because of conflict and national disaster. Yom HaShoah coincides with the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, when Jewish resistance fighters defied the Nazis and fought for freedom and dignity. 

During the program six candles will be lit to honor the six million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. Names of refugees who passed away at the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter and their stories of persecution and flight will be read aloud, followed by the stories of others who lived to carry on with their lives after leaving the shelter in 1946.

Elected and public officials, religious leaders, historians and others will speak of the importance of never forgetting the Holocaust and remembering the over six million victims of the Nazis. Speakers will also talk about current refugee crises and the historical significance of Fort Ontario, where the first group of refugees was allowed into the United States outside the rigid immigration quota system established by Congress in 1924.

Considered the birthplace of U.S. refugee policy, Fort Ontario and its refugees opened the door for other groups fleeing Communism in the 1950s and 1960s, Vietnam in the 1970s, Cuba in 1980, Bosnia in the 1990s, and since then Syria and the Ukraine.

Although others were discussed, Fort Ontario was the only camp for Holocaust refugees established in the United States during World War II. Intended by FDR to convince America’s allies that it was serious about providing rescue and relief to Europe’s Jews, Fort Ontario was where everyday Americans first heard stories of persecution, death, flight and survival at the hands of the Nazis from its victims. Consequently, Oswegonians became the first advocates of the Fort Ontario refugees in what grew into a national campaign to allow them to remain in the U.S. after the war and not be returned to Europe where their families had perished. Fort Ontario is also where the American press finally found a Holocaust story they could relate to after over 12 years of Hitler’s reign of terror, resulting in Holocaust stories moving from the back to the front pages of newspapers.

Fort Ontario State Historic Site is located at the north end of East Fourth Street in the City of Oswego, NY. The Safe Haven Holocaust Refugee Shelter Museum, which is dedicated to telling the story of the shelter, is located at the west end of Barbara Donahue Drive in the old army guardhouse. For more information, visit https://www.safehavenmuseum.com.

FORT ONTARIO OBSERVES HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY- Fort Ontario State Historic Site will host a Holocaust Remembrance Day program on Tuesday, April 18 at 2 p.m. Pictured is a Fort Ontario monument commemorating the 982 Holocaust survivors who came to the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter from 1944-1946.