Israel stopped at 10 a.m. Thursday as sirens blared across the country in memory of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II.
The annual Holocaust Remembrance Day is one of the most solemn days in Israel’s national calendar, with much of the country almost closing for those two minutes to honor those affected by the Nazi killing machine.
The siren stops Israeli life in the open – pedestrians stand still, buses stop on busy streets and cars stop on major highways, with drivers standing on the roads with their heads bowed.
The siren also heralds the beginning of the main day’s ceremonies for the gloomy day that began the night before with the official opening of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.
The ceremonies are also held in schools, public institutions and army bases. At 11 a.m., the Knesset’s “Every Man Has a Name” ceremony, an official annual event during which lawmakers read the names of Holocaust victims, begins.
Get the daily edition of The Times of Israel by email and never miss our leading stories
By registering, you agree to the terms
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, many survivors attend commemorative ceremonies, share stories with teenagers and participate in memorial processions at former concentration camps in Europe. This year, the annual March of the Living resumes after a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which will probably be the last time Holocaust survivors take part in the event.
Only eight Holocaust survivors will attend this year’s March of the Living. Seventy survivors attended the last personal March of the Living in 2019.
International March of the Living in Poland, with participants marching between Auschwitz I and Birkenau (courtesy)
A closing ceremony will be held at the Lohamei HaGeta’ot, a kibbutz founded by Holocaust survivors.
Holocaust survivors, President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and other dignitaries attended the main opening ceremony on Wednesday night.
At the ceremony, Israeli leaders pleaded for an end to political divisions and warned against anti-Semitic rhetoric or attempts to compare the massacre of European Jews to other atrocities.
Both Bennett and the Duke focused on a separate Holocaust incident to provoke the greater, incomprehensible horrors of the Nazi genocide as they spoke at Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust memorial and museum in Israel.
Bennett, who is in power despite losing his parliamentary majority, is protesting against the politics and tribal relations that have split Israel in recent years. He noted that the division between right and left ideologies destroyed ties between Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
“Even in the darkest days of Jewish history, in the hell of destruction, the left and the right failed to cooperate. “Each group is fighting alone against the Germans,” he said.
“We must not dismantle Israel from within. Today, thank God, in the State of Israel we have one army, one government, one parliament and one people – the people of Israel, “he added.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett speaks during a ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem as Israel celebrates Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 27, 2022 (Amos Ben Gershom / GPO)
Bennett also rejected comparisons to the Holocaust, which have become commonplace around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Last month, some Israeli lawmakers clashed with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky when he compared his country to the Holocaust in a speech to Israeli politicians.
“The Holocaust is an unprecedented event in human history. “I’m trying to say that because over the years, more and more serious events have been compared to the Holocaust,” Bennett said.
“But no, even the most serious wars today are not the Holocaust and are not like the Holocaust,” he said, without directly mentioning Ukraine.
“No event in history, no matter how cruel, has been compared to the extermination of Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators,” Bennett said.
History is full of disasters, but the Holocaust is distinguished by its sole purpose – racial annihilation, he said.
“Never, nowhere and at any time has one nation acted to destroy another, in a way that was so planned, systematic and cold-blooded, entirely because of ideology and without any other purpose,” he said.
Also Wednesday night in Yad Vashem, Defense Minister Benny Ganz said that “the mission to protect the Israeli people is stronger than any ideological debate” and is no less important than “Israel’s readiness to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.” .
Israeli officials often cite the security threats facing the country in its Holocaust Remembrance Day addresses, Ganz said, “especially Iran, which is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons and become an existential threat to us.
“Indeed, the state of Israel must have military and moral strength with it. This strength and morality stems from our ability to live as a strong, cohesive society, not as people scattered across the diaspora, divided and divided. “Our resilience as a society enables and justifies our existence,” Ganz added.
In Wednesday’s speech, Bennett used a little girl’s “witness sheet”, an official Yad Vashem document that outlines the basic biographical details of a Jew killed in the Holocaust to illustrate the depth of the horrors of the Holocaust.
President Isaac Herzog addresses the official ceremony of the National Holocaust Remembrance Day in Jerusalem, April 27, 2022 (Screenshot: YouTube)
The girl’s name is left blank on the sheet, her last name is Reich, and her birthplace and place of death are listed as Auschwitz, Bennett said.
“The circumstances of her death: taken away from her mother immediately,” the prime minister read. “Age at the time of death: half an hour.”
The letter was completed by her mother Irene Reich.
The duke used a photo of Nazi soldiers and Ukrainian militia executing a Jewish family on the edge of a pit in Miropol, Ukraine, in 1941 to provoke the horrors of Nazi genocide during his speech.
In the photo, a mother shakes her young son’s hand and leans over while the men shoot her in the back of the head. The boy is barefoot and looks at the trees.
The smoke from the shot hides the mother’s face in a ghostly feather. Another child is on her lap, barely visible in her polka dot skirt. The killers seem to be having fun.
“What did the mother whisper in her little boy’s ear?” Did she beg him not to cry? And what about the child? Did he cry? Was he silent? Did he understand? Were you afraid? “Said the Duke.” The picture is silent, but her voice screams. It shakes us. It stuns us to be silent. “
The photo was the focus of the 2021 book “The Ravine” by historian Wendy Lower. The duke said he felt “grief, anger and pain” when he saw the picture in the book.
The Nazis killed more than 1 million Jews in the Holocaust with bullets, shooting them in forests and fields away from the notorious death camps.
The duke recalled the State of Israel as a “lighthouse” for the world’s Jews after the Holocaust, and said that the discourse that called into question Israel’s right to exist was “not legitimate diplomacy, but pure anti-Semitism that must be eradicated.”
Add Comment