As the siren sounded at 10 A.M., traffic came to a total
standstill. Drivers stood next to their cars and pedestrians stopped
w
 |
|
alking, many of them standing to attention or with their heads
bowed.
A ceremony at Yad Vashem, Israel’s state Holocaust memorial authority, got underway after the two-minute silence, where the annual wreath-laying ceremony will take place.
Yad Vashem picked Voices of the Survivors as the theme of this year’s commemoration, which began Sunday night with a state ceremony and continues through Monday evening. A special exhibition of the works of Holocaust survivors will open at Yad Vashem on Monday afternoon.
About 220,000 aging survivors, many of them destitute and alone, live in Israel, down 50,000 from just two years earlier.
„The voice of the survivors is the link that binds the painful and tormented history of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to the future, to hope and to rebirth,” Yad Vashem said on its Web site.
The names of victims of the Holocaust victims will be read aloud in the Knesset on Monday. The project, called Every Person Has a Name, is meant to break down the number of 6 million into stories of individuals, families and communities wiped out during the war.
