Yom HaShoah: What is it ? why is it so important for Israelis?
At exactly 10 am on Tuesday 18th of April, Holocaust Memorial Day, Israel stopped in remembrance of victims – “The mermaid is our door open to the abyss. It is the call to remembrance, to contact with pain, death. The encounter with the inconsolable. For a minute it sounds, shrill, loud, to our ears. It disturbs the eardrum, to remind us to be present, just for a minute.”, said Mira Neshama Weil, founder of Neshama (an association of Jewish spirituality that aims to promote traditional Jewish spiritual practices).
No matter where people were or what they were doing, they all joined in a moment of silence. Even drivers stopped their cars in the middle of the road. They got out of their cars and joined in the remembrance. The moment felt suspended in time.
One hour after the siren sounds, at 11am, the ceremony begins in the Knesset. There, the MPs will read the names of the victims murdered by the Nazis.
Yom HaShoah marks the beginning of a three-day week of commemorations in Israel: Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron in memory of the soldiers who fell in the defence of Israel and Yom Haatsmaut, which celebrates the independence of the State of Israel.
The past: a wound without treatment
The creation of Israel took place at the end of the Second Word war. It was official on the 14th of May 1948 with the declaration of independence of the State of Israel.
Nazism was based on a racist ideology as we all know. Hitler was convinced of the inequality of the races and the superiority of the “Aryan race”, of which Germans were the best representatives. It was necessary to preserve it by eliminating the “degenerate Germans”. in other terms, physically and mentally handicapped people and races considered inferior: Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, etc. From 1933 to 1939, German Jewish were persecuted and gradually excluded from society (Check also : the Nuremberg Laws of 1935).
Dismissed by the Nazi regime, the Jews took refuge in Palestine. A vote was held for the sharing of land. The new Yishuv and the Jewish Zionist communities welcomed the vote. However, the Palestinian Arabs and all the Arab countries who were campaigning for an Arab state rejected the resolution. The day after the vote, civil war broke out between the Palestinian Jewish and Arab communities.
The war resulted in 6,000 Israeli military and civilian deaths, 2,000 deaths in the Arab armies and an unknown number of Arab civilian deaths. This war also marked the beginning of a very important immigration wave.
“Remembrance is much more than a “duty to remember”.
Mira Neshama Weil.
The memory is waking up, and putting it in perspective.”
Want to learn more on this day and traditions?
The official ceremony marks the beginning of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Victims and Heroism Day. It takes place in the presence of the President of the State of Israel and the Prime Minister, dignitaries and survivors of the Shoah.
Moreover, each year, six Holocaust survivors are selected by Yad Vashem to light six torches in memory of the six million Jewish murdered during the Holocaust. Their personal stories echo the central theme for this Day of Remembrance. Their individual journeys will be traced through 6 short films, screened during the ceremony.
Finally, it is important to note that International Shoah Day was established in 2005 by the United Nations as an International Day of Commemoration dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Shoah. The date of January 27 (release from Auschwitz) was chosen to mark this day.
