In the rest of the world the Holocaust Memorial day is being solemnize on the 27th in January.
On this date the advancing Red Army entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp complex,
liberating more than 7,000 remaining prisoners, who were for the most part ill or dying.
In Israel the date is different, it is on the 27th on the month of Nissan.
It remembers the anniversary of the uprising of the ghetto in Warsaw.
That is the reason that in Israel this day is called the “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day”.
The word Holocaust or Shoah means a catastrophe or calamity.
The Holocaust was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed
approximately six million persons from the Jewish faith,
between the victims’ also 1.5 million children. 2/3 of the Jewish population that
resided in Europe was eliminated.
Some definitions of the Holocaust include the additional five million non-Jewish victims
of Nazi mass murders, bringing the total to about 11 million.
Among them there were populations of Gypsies, retarded, gays and others.
Killings took place throughout Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories.
The persecution and
genocide were carried out in stages,
culminating in what Nazis termed the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”,
an agenda to exterminate Jews in Europe.
The extermination of Jews was carried out in two major operations:
First, mobile killing units that operated in the occupied Soviet territories.
Second, death camps or extermination camps built in south Poland.
This solemn day begins at sunset on the 27th of the month of Nisan and ends the following evening,
according to the traditional Jewish custom of marking a day.
Places of entertainment are closed and memorial ceremonies are held throughout the country.
The central ceremonies, in the evening and the following morning,
are held at Yad Vashem and are broadcasted on the television.
The following morning, the ceremony at Yad Vashem begins with
the sounding of a siren for two minutes throughout the entire country.
For the duration of this alarm, work is halted, people walking in the streets stop,
cars pull off to the side of the road and everybody stands at silent attention
in reverence to the victims of the Holocaust.
For more information:
http://www.yadvashem.org/index.asp
