Posted 4/28/2022 6:21 AMUpdated 4/28/2022 8:11 AM
At 10 a.m. this Thursday morning, a siren will sound across Israel to celebrate Holocaust Day, an annual national commemoration established in 1951 to honor the six million Jewish victims of Nazism. During this shrill two-minute chime, the whole country freezes. Pedestrians stop walking, those driving on the highway stop, get out of their car and stand next to their vehicle…
All restaurants and entertainment venues were closed on Wednesday evening as a ceremony was held at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. On this occasion, six survivors light six giant torches, representing the six million victims. “I think we should even fast on this day to commemorate and honor our dead,” remarks a woman in her 40s from Jerusalem.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, there are 165,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel. Another figure, calculated based on a survey conducted by researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, put the world Jewish population at 15.2 million people today, up from 16.6 million in 1939. So, four generations later, the number of Jews was not return to pre-Shoah levels while world population increased 3.4-fold over the same period. On the other hand, the Jewish population in Israel has fallen from 449,000 to 6.9 million today – or 45% of the world’s Jewish population – of which 5.4 were born in Israel. Altogether the Israeli population is 9.3 million.
History and the present intertwine
This year, the present – even breaking news – mixes with history. After the war in Ukraine, 15,000 refugees, including more than 100 Holocaust survivors, have arrived in Israel in the past two months – 8,800 from Ukraine, 5,800 from Russia and 400 from Belarus. According to the Claims Conference, there are around 10,000 Holocaust survivors in Ukraine. In addition, Atidna, the first Arab-Israeli youth movement, organized for the first time a trip to Auschwitz for a group of 120 of their Muslim, Christian and Bedouin teenagers.
Also for the first time in 2022, the President of the Bundestag, Bärbel Bas, will take part in the various celebrations of this day of remembrance. Arriving in the Knesset on Wednesday, she declared: “The lessons of the Holocaust oblige us not to leave room for anti-Semitism. Germany’s responsibility is not over. We stand by Israel.” On January 27, his Israeli counterpart Mickey Lévy gave a speech in the Bundestag in Berlin on the occasion of International Holocaust Day. Deeply upset, he finally burst into tears without being able to stop.