Sunday
night’s main ceremony at Yad Vashem included six survivors who lit six symbolic
torches to commemorate the 6 million dead. A video segment on each one’s
personal story was presented.
Further
ceremonies include the public reading of names of Holocaust victims at sites
around the country, including Israel’s parliament. Schoolchildren dress in
white and stop their studies to hold memorial ceremonies.
At the
opening ceremony last night, President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu both linked the desperate Jewish revolt of 1943 to the warrior
mentality that enabled the establishment of Israel five years later.
“There was a
never a rebellion like it. They were so few and their bravery remained as a
model for so many,” Peres said at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust
memorial, before hundreds of Holocaust survivors and their families, Israeli
leaders, diplomats and others.
“A clear
line exists between the resistance in the ghettos, in the camps and in the
forests and the rebirth and bravery of the state of Israel. It is a line of
dignity, of renewed independence, of mutual responsibility, of exalting God’s
name,” he said, “as a ray of hope which was not extinguished even during
terrible anguish. The ghetto fighters sought life even when circumstance
screamed despair.”
Netanyahu
called the uprising marked “a turning point in the fate of the Jewish people”
where they transformed from helpless victims into fearless warriors.
Six million
Jews were murdered by German Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust, a
third of world Jewry.
The 1943
Warsaw ghetto uprising was the first large-scale rebellion against the Nazis in
Europe and the single greatest act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.
Though guaranteed to fail, it became a symbol of struggle against impossible
conditions, illustrated a refusal to give in to Nazi atrocities and inspired
other acts of uprising and underground resistance by Jews and non-Jews alike.
While the
world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, the date of the
liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, Israel’s annual Holocaust memorial day
coincides with the Hebrew date of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
The Israeli
flag flew at half-staff and a military honor guard stood at one side of the
podium as poems and psalms were read and the Jewish prayer for the dead was
recited.
Today, fewer
than 200,000 elderly survivors remain in the country.
The annual Memorial
Day is one of the most solemn on Israel’s calendar. Restaurants, cafes and
places of entertainment are shut down, and radio and TV programming are
dedicated almost exclusively to documentaries about the Holocaust, interviews
with survivors and somber music.
On Monday
morning, Israel is scheduled to come to a standstill as sirens wail for two
minutes. Pedestrians typically stop in their tracks, cars and buses halt on
streets and highways and drivers and passengers stand on the roads with their
heads bowed.