BICOM

Israel commenced a 24-hour commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day yesterday evening with a state ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

President Shimon Peres spoke at the ceremony, which was attended by Quartet envoy Tony Blair. Peres 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.” Continuing a similar theme, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “The murderous hatred against the Jews… has simply been replaced by murderous hatred against the Jewish state,” but that “We will not stand helpless against our enemies again.”

The country will come to a standstill at 10am (local time) this morning as a two-minute siren is 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 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 IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz will this 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.