Israel started Sunday night a 24-hour commemoration of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, with a state ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
President Shimon Peres, who spoke at the ceremony attended by Mideast Quartet envoy Tony Blair and Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird, said : “From the ashes of the Holocaust rose spiritual redemption and political rebirth. We rose and we built a state of our own.”
However, he warned “The civilized world must ask itself how in such a short space of time after the crematoria were extinguished… it is still possible for the leadership, like that of Iran, to openly deny the Holocaust and threaten another Holocaust.”
In his speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “The murderous hatred against the Jews has simply been replaced by murderous hatred against the Jewish state,” but that “We will not stand helpless against our enemies again.”
Israeli came to a standstill Monday morning at 10am as a two-minute siren sounded to mark the beginning of memorial ceremonies which will take place in educational, government and official institutions across Israel.
A wreath laying ceremony will take place at Yad Vashem, attended by US Secretary of State John Kerry.
An hour later, at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, names of relatives and friends of legislators who died in the Holocaust will be recited, while candles will be lit by survivors and their families and readings will be given by Israel’s Chief Rabbis.
The Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz will Monday afternoon lead a march of high-school students from the Auschwitz concentration camp to the adjacent Birkenau complex.
The date chosen for Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began seventy years ago.