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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, in 1945, Muriel Knox Doherty, of the Royal Australian Air Force Nursing Service, was assigned to the Bergen- Belsen Concentration Camp to provide relief for Holocaust survivors. She preserved her experience in hundreds of letters, which contained passages like this:

On arrival at Belsen, [the prisoners] lay in the open and were beaten with iron bars. [The] witness' friend was in bed 3 days as a result of these beatings.

``The only reason for this treatment,'' she wrote, ``was that they were Jews.''

``The only reason for this treatment is that they were Jews.''

Yesterday, Jews around the world observed Yom HaShoah--the Holocaust Remembrance Day. I spoke at Temple Emanu-El in New York about it.

This year, Yom HaShoah comes at an especially painful moment for the Jewish people. Seven months ago, over 1,200 innocents were brutally murdered by Hamas in the worst attack against Jews since the Holocaust. In the months since, anti-Semitism has swept our country and the world in ways not seen in generations. Sadly, we see the poison of anti- Semitism amidst some of the protests happening on college campuses today.

This unprecedented rise in anti-Semitism is why I came to the Senate floor last November--to speak at length about the fear that has been growing in the hearts and minds of every Jewish person since October 7. I believe we all have an obligation to call out anti-Semitism wherever we see it arise, be it from the right or from the left.

As I forcefully said in my speech, if anti-Semitism is not repudiated, if it isn't forcefully called out whenever and wherever it arises, it will metastasize into something worse. That is what I wanted to emphasize in my speech.

So, today, I applaud President Biden for taking another strong, decisive step to fight anti-Semitism at the Federal level, with new steps aimed at fighting anti-Semitism in our communities, online, and toward Jewish students.

Among other actions, the President has directed the Department of Education to issue new guidance for college campuses to protect Jewish students and students of all backgrounds so that our universities remain safe havens to learn and grow.

When a Jewish student cannot walk through their quad without fear of harassment or ridicule or something far worse, we have a duty to respond. When swastikas are spray-painted on Jewish gravestones and bomb threats are made against synagogues, it demands action from the government to keep people safe. If ``never again'' is to have any meaning, all of us must own the duty of combating anti-Semitism together at every level of society.

Here in the Senate, I will continue to work with Democrats and Republicans to protect Jewish synagogues, schools, and organizations of all kinds from violence and hate. It is why I fought to increase funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Fund Program, which provides money for synagogues and shuls and schools and other nonprofit religious organizations, whether they be Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, or anything else, to protect themselves against vandalism and violence and all forms of hate.

As I said in my speech on the floor last November, the best way we can work together against anti-Semitism is to preserve the history of the Jewish experience, to tell the truth about the horrors that took place 80 years ago. Only then can we truly honor the memories of the innocent dead. Only then we can be sure that ``the torturer never tortures again.''

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