Holocaust Remembrance Day – Yom HaShoah – began at 8 pm Monday evening in Israel with a series of ceremonies taking place across the country.
Join Israel’s live feed of the opening ceremony.
The theme of this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day centers on the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.
The central ceremony took place – as it does each year – at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Center in Jerusalem.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog attended the ceremony, as did Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who arrived Monday in Israel. The crown prince is the most senior Iranian personality ever to publicly visit the Jewish State.
The ceremony was preceded by a memorial candle-lighting held in the center’s Hall of Remembrance in cooperation with the ‘Our 6 Million’ organization.
Six of Israel’s remaining Holocaust survivors – numbering 148,763, according to data from the National Insurance Institute (Bituach Leumi) – were selected to light each of the six memorial torches during the ceremony that commemorate the six million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis during World War II.
Holocaust Remembrance Day Schedule
On Tuesday, a siren will bring the country to a standstill at 10 am with two minutes of silence. Wreaths will be placed at Yad Vashem.
At 11 am, the ‘Unto Every Person There is a Name,’ annual roll call of Holocaust victims, will be read in a ceremony at Yad Vashem, the Knesset and elsewhere around Israel.
Also at 11 am, the general public is invited to light memorial candles in cooperation with the “Our 6 Million” organization in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Square at Yad Vashem. The candle-lighting continues until 4:30 pm.
At 1 pm, state officials will attend a memorial ceremony at Yad Vashem’s Hall of Remembrance, and 15 minutes later, guided tours for the public are to begin at the museum.
At 5:30 pm, there will be a Youth Movement ceremony at Yad Vashem’s Valley of the Communities.
At 6:45 pm, the Next Generations organization will hold a ceremony at the Palmach Museum in Tel Aviv. Closing ceremonies are to be held at the Ghetto Fighters’ House and in Yad Mordechai.
Holocaust Remembrance Day events will conclude at 8 pm with a rally at the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz marking the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The Statistics
At least 65 percent of Israel’s Holocaust survivors receive a nursing care subsidy in addition to their Bituach Leumi pensions; of those, 22,967 (24 percent) receive nursing services at the most intense level.
Nearly a third of Israel’s Holocaust survivors (31 percent) are also entitled to a veteran’s pension with which to supplement the stipend they receive from Bituach Leumi. Approximately 69 percent of those receiving a veteran’s pension are widowed, living alone or unmarried.
Of those who remain, women comprise 61 percent of Israel’s Holocaust survivors, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), and men constitute 39 percent.
On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world Jewish population still had not renewed itself to the level of the Jewish population in 1939, before the Holocaust.
At the end of 2022, the global Jewish population was 15.3 million, including seven million living in Israel (46 percent of the world Jewish population), according to the CBS.
In 1939, on the eve of World War II, the world Jewish population stood at 16.6 million, of whom just 449,000 (three percent) were living in Israel.
Those figures changed dramatically with the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948; at that point, there were just 11.5 million Jews worldwide, including 650,000 (six percent) living in Israel.
Of those survivors currently living in Israel, some 4.5 percent made aliyah prior to the establishment of the state, between 1933 and 1947.
One-third of the remaining survivors (31.7 percent) immigrated to Israel in the great wave that followed the establishment of the state, from 1948 to 1951.
Another 29.7 percent have immigrated to Israel between 1952 and 1989 (34 percent) since the 1990s, during the most recent wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union (USSR).
