Nation marks Holocaust Remembrance Day

Jerusalem Post ^ | Apr. 17, 2004 | ETGAR LEFKOVITS

[yonif]

The nation will pause to mark the start of Holocaust Remembrance Day Sunday night, to commemorate the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

The official state ceremony will take place Sunday night at 8 p.m. at Yad Vashem will be broadcast live on channels 1, 2 and 10 as well as on Israel Radio and Army Radio.

Both Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President Moshe Katsav will make formal addresses at the ceremony, which will culminate with the lighting of six torches, in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

All places of entertainment will be closed Sunday night.

On Monday, a two-minute siren will sound at 10 a.m. at the start of a series of day-long ceremonies marking Holocaust Remembrance Day nationwide.

The official state wreath-laying ceremony will take place just after the Monday-morning siren at the Warsaw Ghetto uprising memorial, in the presence of the prime minister and other VIPs, which will be followed by the "Unto Every Person There is a Name" ceremony, which will be held both in the Hall of Remembrance and the Knesset.

One of the six torch lighters at the opening ceremony, Hungarian-born David Leitner, 74, had, was horded as a young boy of 14 with hundreds of other children to the crematorium at Birkenau.

Amid cries of "Shema Yisrael" and calls for their parents, the children were stripped naked for extermination. Minutes before certain death, the selection process was suddenly stopped since a group of children was needed to unpack potatoes from a train of supplies that just arrived. Leitner was one of 50 children selected for the task.

After the war, Leitner sailed to Israel in 1949, where he met his Israeli-born wife. Today, they have two daughters, 10 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

"It is especially important for today's youth to remember what we went through, when we did not have a state of our own," he said.

[yonif]

Sorry. Meant to say that it will be happening tommorow 3AM American time.

[Tuco Ramirez]

Is there a commemoration for those non-Jewish people killed, or is this Jewish only? Hitler killed over 20 million other people (Russian, Ukrainian, Gypsy, & Pole) that he had personal dislikes for). Are they remembered as well? This disaster was such for many other people as well; to omit them from rememberances is the ultimate disrespect. (For what its worth, I'm not one of those "other" groups, but their memory lives on with us as well).

[yonif]

Well Israel is a Jewish state, and they are remembering those of their own nation.

[Tuco Ramirez]

I didn't read this as an Isreali message; understood. I thought it was an American thing.

[goldstategop]

If Israel's leaders really want to honor the memory of the Six Million, they should start by launching a real war on terror and eliminate Arafart and the PA as well the Hamas leadership. A failure to do so will void all the vows of "Never Again" of all real meaning.

[cherry]

this was a tragedy in the history of mankind, no doubt about it....

but, in all respect for those who were killed, I would just like to see a little more historical concern for other peoples wiped out by evil tyrannts and their followers....

do we commemorate those killed in Russia?...or Cambodia?...or Rowanda?....or even, those killed in Sudan or any number of African nations where there is widespread violence..

of course, we all know that Sadamm killed a quick 100,000.....

If we want to understand what butchers we humans can be, I think we must remember all the victims....everywhere....

[Maven007]

What, to a large extent, seperates man from beasts in the field is our ability to distinguish between one thing and other - to understand, in other words, that one thing is not another. And the Holocaust is unlike any other genocide for many reasons, including:

1) It was the pre-planned industrialized slaughter of an entire people carried out with meticulous precision by a huge bureaucracy and millions of willing murderers.

2) It was carried out not just by one government or ethnic group, but with the willing and total co-operation of many countries and peoples in Europe.

3) It took place in the heart of what was meant to be the civilised world.

4) It was, in many places, almost entirely successful. Whereas there are millions of Cambodians, Armenians etc. still living in the places where genocides took place, Jews have been almost literally effaced from what was once their heartland in Central and Eastern Europe - e.g. a few thousand Jews in Poland where there once 3.5 million; five thousand Jews in Lithuania were there once 250,000; 40,0000 Jews in Belarus where there once well over 1,000,000.

Despite the throat-clearing exercise at the start of your post in which you expressed concern for the victims of the Holocaust, you were as convincing as those anti-Semites who always begin their anti-Semitic rants with "some of my best friends are Jews." Those who suggest that the Holocaust should be subsumed into some grand memorial for everyone ever murdered are really concerned with trying to diminish the importance of the Holocaust - it really is that simple.

Let me add finally:

1) This Holocaust Memorial Day is taking place in the Jewish state. Are you suggesting that we cannot remember our own? Perhaps you imagine that Chinese soldiers should be buried at the Arlington National Cemetry?

2) No one is preventing you from remembering other genocides. Indeed, at the Holocaust museum in Washington special exhibits do that very thing.

3) Perhaps Europeans and Americans feel obliged to remember the Holocaust because it is a way of atoning for what their countries did and did not do during the years when it was being implemented.

I would not have dreamed of deliberately insulting your nation on Memorial Day (or indeed any other day). I expect you to show the same respect for the six million innocent Jewish souls murdered within living memory while the other inhabitants of the "civilised" world either collaborated or turned their backs.

[familyop]

"I didn't read this as an Isreali message; understood. I thought it was an American thing."

That's not a bad idea at all, since the Jews were the only religious group that the Romans and their Saxon allies tried for thousands of years to completely exterminate.

[Napoleon Solo]

A much better and calmer reply to "Cherry" than what went through my mind.

[SJackson]

Yad Vashem in Israel does remember them. You can't blame Israel for the short memory of most of the rest of the world, including lots of Americans.

[Salem]

'Ping!' on this thread. Pay careful attention to Maven007's comment.





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[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

Excellent post in #9

[netmilsmom]

Your post is poetry!
May I quote you to my friends (who try very hard to mask their Jewish bigotry)?

[Tuco Ramirez]

I didn't blame Israel for anything.