Israel will begin commemorations of Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday evening with a state ceremony to remember the six million Jewish victims of Nazi persecution and to honor the remaining survivors of World War II atrocities.
A state ceremony for Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day will be held at 8 p.m. at Warsaw Ghetto Square on the Mount of Remembrance at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and Memorial.
Both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin will deliver remarks at the ceremony, during which six Holocaust survivors will light six memorial torches while their stories of survival are shown by video.
On Tuesday evening, Netanyahu met the six torchbearers: Bela Eizenman, Shaul Lubovitz, Fanny Ben-Ami, Menachem Haberman, Sara Shapira and Yehuda Mimon.
"Your stories are stories of awful tragedy and supreme heroism. You met with cold, suffering and tribulations and you overcame them. You triumphed. We triumphed. I will never forget this. My wife's family, her father's entire family, was wiped out," Netanyahu told them.
The state ceremony Wednesday evening will include musical performances, an IDF Paratroopers Honor Guard and the traditional recitation of chapter from Psalms, the kaddish mourner's prayer and El Maleh Rahamim, the Jewish prayer for the souls of the martyrs.
"On days when hatred and anti-Semitism run wild, it is important for humanity to come together and remember the lessons it has learned years ago," Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer remarked at a National Day of Remembrance ceremony in Washington.
Holocaust Memorial Day events will continue throughout Thursday, beginning with a two-minute siren at 10 a.m. that will bring the entire country to a standstill in collective remembrance.
The United Nations in 2007 designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to mark the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi death camps.
Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day separately.
Some 200,000 Holocaust survivors reside in Israel today, many living below the poverty line.
This article was originally published by i24NEWS. Read more at https://www.i24news.tv/en.
