Holocaust Memorial Day In Israel To Commence This Evening


By Joel Leyden
Israel News Agency

Jerusalem----May 4….There will be no music played in Israel tonight.
All restaurants and places of entertainment will be closed as of 4 p.m. as Israel prepares to remember the Nazi Holocaust which claimed over 11 million lives. Of the six million Jews who were shot, hanged and gassed, approximately 250,000 Holocaust survivors are thought to be living in Israel.

Most Israelis will be at home or attending memorial services being held in every Israeli city at 8 p.m. this evening.

The annual state ceremony, which this year will mark 60 years since the end of World War II, will begin at 8 p.m. at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. The solemn hour-long opening event, which will be broadcast live on Israeli television channels and radio, will be attended by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President Moshe Katsav, as well as scores of dignitaries and ambassadors from around the world.

The central theme of this year's ceremony, coming six decades after the survivors of the darkest chapter in the 20th century were liberated from the Nazis, will be "The Anguish of Liberation and the Return to Life." During the ceremony, six torches will be lit by Holocaust survivors in memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The chief rabbis of Israel will recite both a selection from Psalms as well as kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer.

Tomorrow morning, a two-minute air raid siren will sound at 10 a.m. from Metulla on the Lebanese border to Eilat as the start of a series of day-long ceremonies throughout the Jewish nation calling every Israeli to stand at attention and reflect in silence. Cars and trucks will pull over to the side of the road, Ben-Gurion airport will freeze and Israel Defense Forces soldiers at every base will take turns guarding a holocaust flame for the next 24 hours. The official state wreath-laying ceremony will take place just after the siren is sounded at the Warsaw Ghetto uprising memorial at Yad Vashem, in the presence of the prime minister and other VIPs. The "Unto Every Person There is a Name" ceremony will follow – in which Holocaust victims' names are read out – at both the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem, and the Knesset.

For survivors, the Holocaust remains real and ever-present, but for some others, sixty years makes the Holocaust seem part of a long history. Many survivors still bear the numbers which were tattooed onto their forearms after they had entered death camps in Germany and Poland. For anyone who bears witness to these numbered tattoo, they also bear direct witness of the Holocaust. Year-round Yad Veshem, Israel's Foreign Ministry and many Jewish places of worship try to teach and inform others about the horrors of the Holocaust. We confront the questions of what happened. How did it happen. How could it happen. Could it happen again.

We attempt to fight against ignorance with education and against disbelief with proof. But there is one day in the year when we make a special effort to remember (Zachor). Upon this one day, we remember those that suffered, those that fought, and those that died. Six million Jews were murdered. Many families were completely decimated. Why this day? Jewish history is long and filled with many stories of slavery and freedom, sorrow and joy, persecution and redemption.

For Jews, their history, their family, and their relationship with God have shaped their religion and their identity. The Hebrew calendar is filled with varied holidays that incorporate and reiterate the history and tradition of the Jewish people. After the horrors of the Holocaust, Jews wanted a day to memorialize this tragedy. But what day? The Holocaust spanned years with suffering and death spread throughout these years of terror. No one day stood out as representative of this destruction. So various days were suggested.

The tenth of Tevet was proffered. This day is Asarah B'Tevet and marks the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem. But this day holds no direct relation or tie to the Holocaust. The Zionists in Israel, many of whom had fought in the ghettos or as partisans, wanted to commemorate the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising - April 19, 1943. But this date on the Hebrew calendar is the 15th of Nissan - the beginning of Passover, a very important and happy holiday. Orthodox Jews objected to this date. For two years, the date was debated.

Finally, in 1950, compromises and bargaining began. The 27th of Nissan was chosen, which falls beyond Passover but within the time span of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Orthodox Jews still did not like this date because it was a day of mourning within the traditionally happy month of Nissan. As a final effort to compromise, it was decided that if the 27th of Nissan would affect Shabbat (fall on Friday or Saturday), then it would be moved to the following Sunday. On April 12, 1951, the Knesset (Israel's parliament) proclaimed Yom Hashoah U'Mered HaGetaot (Holocaust and Ghetto Revolt Remembrance Day) to be the 27th of Nissan. The name later became known as Yom Hashoah Ve Hagevurah (Devastation and Heroism Day) and even later simplified to Yom Hashoah. This year, the Yom Hashoah will be on May 5, 2005.

Since Yom Hashoah is a relatively new holiday, there are no set rules or rituals. What kind of ritual could represent the Holocaust? There are various beliefs about what is and is not appropriate on this day - and many of them are conflicting. In general, Yom Hashoah has been observed with candlelighting, speakers, poems, prayers, and singing. Often, six candles are lighted to represent the six million. Holocaust survivors speak about their experiences or share in the readings. Some ceremonies have people read from the Book of Names for certain lengths of time in an effort to remember those that died and to give an understanding of the huge number of victims. Sometimes these ceremonies are held in a cemetery or near a Holocaust memorial. In Israel, the Knesset made Yom Hashoah a national public holiday in 1959 and in 1961 a law was passed that closed all public entertainment on Yom Hashoah. In whatever form one observes Yom Hashoah, the memory of the Jewish victims will live on.

Thousands of people from some 50 countries have begun converging on southern Poland to take part Thursday in a march in memory of Holocaust victims at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most grimly efficient of Nazi death camps.

"This year's 'March of the Living' will be the largest ever, with 18,000 to 20,000 people coming to Auschwitz on May 5, which is Holocaust Remembrance Day," the event's director Aaron Tamir told reporters in Warsaw last week. "It is going to be a huge and complicated event because this year marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and death camps in other countries, and the whole world is paying attention," Tamir said. At least 1.1 million men, women and children, most of them Jews, died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the key extermination sites for Nazi Germany's "final solution," which aimed to wipe out Europe's 11 million Jews.

The Nazis succeeded in exterminating six million European Jews, half of them from Poland, home to Europe's largest Jewish community before World War II. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, his Polish counterpart Marek Belka and Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany of Hungary, which lost 450,000 Jews at Auschwitz, will be among dignitaries who will attend the event. Sharon was "unlikely to march," the organizers told AFP.

March of the Living Young Israeli participants at the Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp during the March of the Living in 2002. In light of the huge numbers taking part this year, the organizers have arranged for thousands of people to set off Thursday morning for the three-kilometer (two-mile) walk from the train station at Oswiecim -- the Polish town which tragically gave its Germanized name to the Auschwitz camp -- to the Birkenau sector of the death camp. The main march, which will group around 10,000 people, including many international officials, will leave from the original camp at Auschwitz in the early afternoon. "We've hired six special trains to bring participants to Oswiecim," Tamir said.


"Never Again"

Auschwitz was set up by the Nazis in 1940 on the site of a former Polish army barracks on the outskirts of Oswiecim and expanded later to the village of Brzezinka -- Birkenau in German -- three kilometers away, to allow Hitler's Germany to more efficiently kill Jews, Sinti, Roma, Poles and others considered inferior human beings. At Birkenau, near the rubble of two interconnecting gas chambers and crematoria the marchers will gather in mid-afternoon for a memorial ceremony, held near the train track that carried Jews and other deportees to almost certain death more than 60 years ago. The camp was liberated on Jan. 27, 1945 by Soviet troops. Belka, Sharon, professor, writer and former Auschwitz inmate Elie Wiesel will be among those to give speeches to the gathering, which this year will include as many Holocaust survivors and their descendants as possible, according to Tamir. Countering Holocaust deniers "The survivors will not be with us forever, and when they are gone, it will be easier for those who deny the Holocaust to spread untruths," Tamir said. "The idea for the march came some 20 years ago when there were voices saying the Holocaust never existed," he said. The denials "were heard by students and young people around the world and the founders of the March of the Living decided the best way to stop the debate was to bring youths from all countries to see with their own eyes what happened."

Candles lit to remember the Holocaust victims at the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi-era Auschwitz death camp at a loading ramp of former German railway company Deutsche Reichsbahn on Jan. 27, 2005. From its start in 1988, when it gathered small groups of young Jewish people, the March of the Living has grown to include "adults, survivors, students, youngsters, pupils" and, for the past few years, non-Jews. "Our project is to take people 'from Holocaust to revival,'" Tamir said. Some participants come to Poland just for the day of the march while others spend a week in the central European country, which lost six million civilians in World War II, half of them Jews, visiting sites linked to the Holocaust. "Participants see and feel the Holocaust with their own eyes," Tamir said. "Then many young people fly to Israel for the 'revival' part of our project." The principal aim of the march remains "to make sure that what happened more than 60 years ago never happens again," he added.

On this sad, quiet day in Israel we remember and shed a tear.
Modern Israel, which was born out of the ashes of the Holocaust, is a living reminder of the families which were separated - men, women and children who were murdered because their only crime was that they were Jewish.

We teach our children, read books and watch Holocaust documentaries on Israel TV so as not to forget not one soul whose body was placed into an oven.
We look at Israel's enemies - Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia and stare Islamic terrorists from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah in the face as we collectively say to all who dare to harm or discriminate against the Jewish people: "never again."

ISRAEL NEWS AGENCY

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