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President Isaac Herzog called for the discord within Israel at the moment to be put aside during a day of grieving.
By: WIN Staff – worldisraelnews.com
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for unity and compared Iran to Nazi Germany in an address at the Yad Vashem Memorial marking Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday evening.
The Israeli leader hailed the founding of the State of Israel was “the peak of the victory of the Jewish people” but noted that the Jewish people were still under threat.
Iran seeks to exterminate the Jewish people like the Nazis, he said, and Israel must be able to “defend itself by itself.”
He called for “power and internal unity” at a time of turmoil within the country.
Netanyahu hailed Rabbi Leo Dee, whose wife and two daughters were murdered by a Palestinian terrorist, for the fact that “at his lowest point,” Dee voiced pleas for national unity and proclaimed: “Am Yisrael Chai.”
President Isaac Herzog also spoke, calling for the discord within Israel at the moment to be put aside during a day of grieving.
“It seems that even the obvious must be said: for the Nazi monster, differing opinions within our nation made not the slightest difference. None of the ideologies, beliefs, or ways of life, none of the differences within our people, held any meaning. For them, we were all one people… whose fate was one: death and extinction.”
The Israeli president then chose to highlight a lesser-known anecdote of the Nazi machine, when the bodies of 86 Jews who were murdered at the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in France were sent to become exhibits in a planned “museum of skulls and skeletons of an extinct race.”
“The Nazi beast planned a museum of horrors at the Reichsuniversität Strasburg in France. A collection of limbs belonging to our brothers and sisters, whose bodies were cut open, chopped up, and squeezed into test tubes and glass bottles to be displayed and catalogued in an orderly way.”
“The Nazis were also thinking about the day after. The day when no living Jew would remain anywhere on earth. How would the ‘enlightened’ world, ‘cleansed’ of Jews, recall this extinct inferior race?” he said.
The number of Holocaust survivors living in Israel stands at nearly 150,000, according to statistics published on Sunday by the Holocaust Survivors’ Rights Authority.
JNS.org reported that the 147,199 Holocaust survivors residing in the Jewish state include 521 new immigrants from war-torn Ukraine who last year were recognized as survivors of the Nazi genocide.
Holocaust Remembrance Day, an annual event in Israel commemorating the six million Jews murdered by the Germans and their collaborators, and those who fought back and partook in rescue efforts, takes place this year from Monday evening until the following evening. The somber day features a two-minute siren at 10 a.m. local time when the country comes to a standstill.
One of the central themes of this year’s commemoration is Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, as the world marks 80 years since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
According to the data, 462 Holocaust survivors celebrated their 100th birthdays last year. Around 31,000 are more than 90 years old. The average age of survivors is 85 and the youngest survivor is 76.
Haifa is home to the largest population of Shoah survivors in Israel, followed by Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
