Silence and sirens for Holocaust memorial

Israel marks remembrance day with warning over present-day atrocities

JERUSALEM - Israel marked the beginning of its annual day of Holocaust remembrance on Sunday evening with an official ceremony in Jerusalem.

From sunset on Sunday to Monday, the country will officially commemorate the genocide of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II.

During the 24 hours, restaurants, cafes, cinemas and other places of entertainment are closed with memorial ceremonies held across the country. TV and radio stations are broadcasting solely Holocaust-related content, such as documentaries, interviews with survivors and melancholic songs.

The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day, as it is officially known, started with the annual ceremony at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem.

The ceremony begun with the national flag lowered to half-mast. Then six Holocaust survivors, each representing 1 million of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, lighted six torches.

The ceremony was attended by President Reuven Rivlin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who both spoke about the mass killings in Syria's six-year war.

Rivlin said the Jews, as people who suffered genocide, must not remain silent in the face of the atrocities that are happening in its northern neighbor.

"Man is beloved, every man, created in God's image. This is a sacred obligation that the Jewish people cannot and does not wish to evade. At all times. In every situation. So too, we cannot remain silent in the face of the horrors being committed far away from us, and certainly those happening just across the border," Rivlin said, referring to the civil war in Syria, which is estimated to have killed more than 300,000 people.

In his address, Netanyahu said the lives of at least 4 million Jews could have been saved if the Allied powers had bombed Nazi death camps in 1942.

"In many cases, the world stands by and does not prevent instances of mass murder or genocides," he said, referring to the atrocities in Syria, Rwanda and Sudan.

Netanyahu warned against the dangers of standing by, and praised US President Donald Trump's recent airstrike on a Syrian army's air base in response to a chemical weapons attack that killed nearly 90 civilians.

Earlier at the government's weekly meeting, Netanyahu said the Jews had gone "from being defenseless people to a state with a defensive capacity that is among the strongest in the world."

On Monday morning, the Israeli government participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at Yad Vashem where names of Holocaust victims were recited and a two-minute siren sounded across the country.

Drivers exited their cars and buses ground to a halt, while students at schools marked the two minutes of silence that began at 10:00 am.

Israeli radio and television stations have aired testimony, documentaries and films on the genocide carried out by the Nazis since Sunday night.

The state of Israel was created in 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust as the national home for the Jewish people.

More than 213,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel today, many of them below the poverty line, according to survivors' groups.