BATON ROUGE — Sunday afternoon, in Baton Rouge, the Jewish Federation of Greater Baton Rouge and Unified Jewish Congregation came together to host a Yom HaShoah program.

Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, is marked by ceremonies and acts of remembrance.

On Sunday, dozens gathered at the unified Jewish congregation of Baton Rouge for a day of remembrance.

"Today's program is a Yom Hashoah Rememberance Program, where we honor the 6 million lives of Jews that were murdered during the holocaust," Ellen Sager, Executive Director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Baton Rouge, said.

During the program, stories were shared by people such as Dr. Hy Penn of the Holocaust Museum Houston. Dr. Penn's parents and grandmother were Holocaust survivors from Poland and Lithuania.

Several posters also told the stories of local holocaust survivors who couldn't make it to the event, such as Miriam Bensman, a Baton Rouge resident who was exiled as a child to the soviet union and lived under communist rule until the end of the Second World War.

Sager said that the program is important because of a rise in antisemitism.

"The Jewish community makes up less than a third of the United States population, but is the direct target of 75 percent of the hate. It is more important that we share the importance of what we're facing here in our local community," Sager said.

In conjunction with the program, the federation also runs a Holocaust Essay Contest. WBRZ spoke to one of the finalists, Rowan Marks, a 7th grader at the Louisiana State University Laboratory School in Baton Rouge.

The essay prompt that Marks answered was: 'The Holocaust teaches us how hatred and prejudice can grow and lead to terrible violence. How can people today use these lessons to speak out against hate and protect others from discrimination?'

"It was about how people stand by during the holocaust and didn't do anything, and about how, like my personal experiences with antisemitism and how I stood up for myself, and we can stand up for others and like abolish hate if we just use words and stuff," Marks said.

Rabbi Sarah Smiley of the Unified Jewish Congregation of Baton Rouge said that programs like these are why it's important to keep telling these stories.

"Soon there will be no first-hand survivors left to share their stories, so today's event is a good example of using the next generation to continue telling those stories because it is through memory and stories, which will allow us to learn what happened and maybe even feel a bit of a connection," Rabbi Smiley said.