Calls For Unity At Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

JERUSALEM (Worthy News) – Ceremonies were underway in Israel on Tuesday to mark the National Holocaust Memorial Day after the nation’s President Isaac Herzog urged Israelis to unite followings weeks of violence and protests.

Especially the time leading up to Soldiers’ Remembrance Day and Independence Day next week must be “above all dispute,” he said on Monday at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

“We are one people and one people we shall remain, brought together not only by a painful history but also by our shared, hope-filled future and fate.”

Herzog referred to bloody clashes in Israel in recent months after mass protests against planned judicial reforms pressed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing religious government.

The plans are currently frozen, and mediation attempts are underway, though so far have failed to bring about a breakthrough.

Organizers said that this year, the focus on Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day was the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto 80 years ago in Poland.

In 1943, the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Poland opposed Nazi Germany’s final effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to death camps.

SYMBOL OF STRUGGLE

It also became one of the symbols of the struggle against the Holocaust, in which some 6 million Jews were killed, and many more suffered under the horrors of Nazi Germany.

Sirenes could be heard Tuesday across Israel to remember the victims.

Netanyahu said in Yad Vashem, Israel’s National Holocaust memorial, that the history of the uprising obliges Israelis to internal unity. “Only in this way can we defeat those who want to destroy us.”

Today, he claimed, this is Iran, “which must be prevented from gaining nuclear weapons.” Iran’s dealership often called for the destruction of Israel.

Netanyahu spoke at a time of reported growing antisemitism worldwide impacting the global Jewish population, which at the end of 2022 was 15.3 million, including seven million living in Israel.

In 1939, on the eve of World War Two, the world Jewish population was 16.6 million, of whom just 449,000, or three percent, were living in Israel, according to official estimates.

Following the Holocaust, also known as the Shoah in Hebrew, there were just 11.5 million Jews worldwide, including 650,000 living in Israel, historical records show.

Those figures changed dramatically with the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948, with many survivors starting a new life in Israel.

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