US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday addressed Holocaust survivors in a special gala dinner after the main event of the Fifth World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem.
Pelosi spoke of fighting anti-Semitism and noted that the survivors are the real VIPs of the events.
Pelosi said she was honored to be present at the event with Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein, who served time as a prisoner of Zion in a Soviet jail for over three years.
“For a long time, when he was in the Gulag, the rest of us were out in San Francisco – all over the world, but my experience was in my home city of San Francisco, several years before I was in Congress – and we would hold up his picture. He had a little beard, long hair, and we would hold up his picture and chant his name to free him. It was part of our whole program, to free Refuseniks, but he was the personification of it,” she said, before thanking the Knesset Speaker for his leadership.
“It was an honor to be with scores of heads of state, heads of government, heads of parliaments and all the rest, that was wonderful. It was such tribute to the purpose of these few days. But the VIPs of it all were the survivors, and so many of them are with us this evening. Let us applaud our survivors who are here,” continued Pelosi.