OTTAWA — The National Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in Ottawa won’t be held on Yom Hashoah this year, because the latter falls on the same day as the federal election.

Fran Sonshine

The Canadian Society for Yad Vashem said this year’s ceremony has been bumped to June 14 because of the May 2 vote.

Moving the ceremony back nearly six weeks after Yom Hashoah was the only way for organizers to ensure they get the participants they want at the event, society representatives said.

“Since the raison d’etre of the national ceremony is to have our nation’s leaders and parliamentarians honour the victims and Canadian survivors of the Holocaust, and this is clearly not possible given the understandable reality of election day, [we] decided that the date for the… ceremony be moved to the earliest date possible after May 2, 2011,” Fran Sonshine and Yaron Ashkenazi – the organization’s national chair and executive director, respectively – said in an e-mail to The CJN.

“Furthermore, we believed that a date change for the ceremony was necessary so as not to interfere with the civic duty of the hundreds of guests coming from across the country who would be casting their vote on election day.”

Fra and Ashkenazi said they chose June 14 as the date in order to issue invitations to newly elected MPs and give them and other dignitaries enough time to reply and confirm their attendance.

The date change also allows enough time to “arrange to have an official program prepared which would acknowledge their participation,” they wrote.

Canada passed its Holocaust Memorial Day Act in 2003. It stipulates that Yom Hashoah, as determined in each year by the Jewish lunar calendar, will annually be proclaimed as the country’s Holocaust Memorial Day. This year, Yom Hashoah falls on May 2.

Asked whether their organization had considered rescheduling the ceremony to May 1, Sonshine and Ashkenazi said that date would have conflicted with Toronto’s annual community Holocaust commemoration ceremony in Earl Bales Park that the society is co-hosting with UJA Federation of Greater Toronto’s Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre.

That event is expected to draw more than 2,000 people, they said.

Additionally, they said MPs, senators and supreme court judges are usually not available to attend weekend ceremonies.