Dateline Jerusalem — Yom HaShoah-Holocaust Memorial Day, also is known as Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day. I lit a 25-hour memorial candle and said a prayer. Last Sunday night and Monday, the entire country of Israel solemnly observed the commemoration of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.
Sunday night the Israeli government held official memorials, one a torch ceremony with six Holocaust survivors, accompanied by their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, each taking a brass flame-lit torch to light the memorial fires. Each of those six survivors represented one million of the six million Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust. The mourners’ Kaddish prayer was recited by the chief rabbi of Israel. The evening ended with the singing of Israel's national anthem “Hatikva” (The Hope). That song alone brings tears to my eyes, goosebumps, shivers to my body.
Monday morning the entire country came to a standstill at 10 o’clock. A loud air raid siren blared throughout the land, bringing cars, buses, trains to a halt, drivers and passengers exiting their vehicles to stand at attention in silence for two minutes. This is out of respect to those who lost their lives in the Holocaust for the crime of being a Jew. I was at a doctor's appointment when everyone stopped what they were doing. No sounds (except for the screeching of the siren) nor visible movement. Doctors, nurses, patients stood together in deafening silence. In Jerusalem there was a wreath-laying ceremony at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Names of Holocaust victims were read out loud there as well as at the Knesset, Israel's legislature. One event in Rehovot, my town, was the testimony from a survivor victim of the inhumane medical experiments conducted at the Auschwitz concentration camp by Dr. Joseph Mengele. Y'mach sh’mo. May his name be blotted out.
How Sad
Of the 193,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel, 50,000 live in poverty. Some of my friends, well into their 80s and 90s, with numbers tattooed into the flesh of their arms, endured concentration camp tortures. Some of their children, my generation, still find it hard to cope with the horrors their parents and grandparents experienced. On Sunday, a close friend spoke at a charity function in the apartment of an Auschwitz concentration camp survivor. She read excerpts from her mother's memoirs, an extremely emotional experience for her and for the audience. Her mother's and father's families, and the siblings she never knew, perished in the camps.
All regular TV programming was cancelled to pay respect to those who lost their lives. The only programs on the air were those of the torch and wreath-laying ceremonies, life stories of Holocaust survivors, various Holocaust documentaries, and movies such as “Sophie's Choice,” “Schindler's List” and “The Devil's Arithmetic.” News coverage was Holocaust-oriented.
Against this backdrop of the genocide of European Jewry during World War II, almost one-third of European Jews today are considering emigration from Europe due to anti-Jewish sentiment, laws against ritual kosher slaughter and circumcision, and increased hate crimes perpetrated against Jews on a daily basis. There is the rise in neo-Nazi factions. They have won up to 20 percent of the vote in European Parliamentary elections such as France's Front Nationale, Greece's Golden Dawn, and Ukraine's Svobova parties. Of special concern is the rise of Hungary's Jobbik party on the 70th anniversary of the mass deportation and murder of a half-million Hungarian Jews.
Conversation among Israelis is that the atmosphere in Europe today is eerily similar to that of Europe in the 1930s when Nazism was on the rise. Jews might be saying “Do not forget. Never again.” However, it seems much of the world already has forgotten.
L'hitraot. Shachar