[img]96|left|||no_popup[/img] Dateline Jerusalem — I write this Monday night, on the eve of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance and Memorial Day.
Next week Israel will celebrate its 61st anniversary as the State of Israel, and the day before will observe Israel's Memorial Day, commemorating those who lost their lives in Israel's continual fight for its existence and for the victims of terrorism.
Very few survivors of the Holocaust, where over six million Jewish men, women and children were murdered, are still alive today.
The majority of those who survived the death and labor camps, the forced marches, the mass shootings, the gas chambers and ovens, the cruel medical experiments, and a myriad of unimaginable atrocities, made their way to the land of Israel because the rest of the world did not want them.
Tonight and tomorrow morning sirens sound throughout Israel.
Everyone stops what they are doing, no matter where they are at the time.
Traffic halts while people get out of their cars and stand at attention with heads bowed in silence for two full minutes.
A Uniform Stance
Pedestrians do not move or say a word.
Tonight I lit memorial candles for those who lost their lives just because they were Jewish.
All scheduled radio and TV shows are suspended except for news programs showing Holocaust memorial events, movies and newsreel footage of concentration camps and the condition of their few survivors, and shows in which survivors speak about the ordeals they went through during the Holocaust.
One such show had two men in their 80s whose numbers tattooed on their arms were one number apart, even though they did not know each other. They were recently reunited (one lives in Haifa and one in Jerusalem), learning that they were both teenagers when they stood in line together to get tattooed. Both were the only ones in their families to survive the Auschwitz concentration camp.
I also watched the torch lighting ceremony at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem where survivors took lit torches joining their flames with the burning flames at the memorial. Seeing these events gave me shivers and tears streaming down my face.
Coincidence? I Don’t Think so
Yet, on this eve of Holocaust Remembrance and Memorial Day, the U.N.'s Durban II opened its Conference on Racism in Geneva, Switzerland, with Iran's Ahmadinejad as a guest speaker where he did nothing but vilify Israel and the U.S. in his speech earlier today.
This is the same Ahmadinejad who claims that there was no Holocaust and that Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth.
This is a conference that only deplores Israel, ignoring the racism and genocide occurring in the rest of the world.
Prior to the conference, Australia, Canada, Italy, Holland, Poland, New Zealand, Sweden, and Germany decided to boycott the event. Yesterday, the U.S. finally decided to join in the boycott, but “with regret.” Although the United Kingdom, Jordan, France and Finland attended the conference, they walked out during Ahmadinejad's speech.
I wonder whether the timing of the U.N. conference on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day was intentional. Considering that Israel is the only nation in the U.N. prevented from being on the Security Council, that there is a special U.N. committee formed to investigate only Israel, and that the guest speaker claims there was no Holocaust, I doubt if it was a coincidence.
No wonder it is said that the rise in anti-semitism is as prevalent now as just prior to World War II.
L'hitraot, Shachar
Shachar is the Hebrew name of a California-based attorney and former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy who moved to Israel last year.
