Israel Marks Annual Memorial Observance of Holocaust

All of Israel stood still at eight o’clock this morning as two-minute blast on sirens ushered in the nation’s annual memorial observance of the Nazi holocaust. Memorial ceremonies started last night. Eighty-one assemblies were held in major cities. Thirty-four memorial services are being held today, climaxed by the central closing assembly at the Yad Vashem, the memorial to Jewish martyrs. Premier Golda Meir addressed the assembly this evening. She said it was imperative for Israel “to remember what happened yesterday to keep it from happening tomorrow.” She said some people criticized Israel for “remembering too much” and claim that because of it “we do not go forward.” But, she said, “We do and will remember because we shall not go forward if it means returning to a place that is fraught with memories of danger to our survival.”

Thousands of people, many of them holocaust survivors from Poland, gathered at the Martyrs Forest near Jerusalem for a mass memorial service. Rabbi Yitzhak Yedidia Frenkel claimed that Israel’s answer to the holocaust must be the “mass migration from all the diaspora for the economic and security consolidation of the State.” Several thousand Hebrew University students attended a memorial tribute and mass rally on the campus this afternoon. They were addressed by the Rector, Prof. Yaacov Katz and Gideon Hausner, a Knesset member. Katz observed that “the myth of Jewish emancipation in Europe was shattered when one large country forcibly took away the great achievement of that emancipation–that of equal rights.” He was referring to the Soviet Union. The mood in Israel was more solemn than on any Sabbath. All places of entertainment have been closed since last night. Radio and television broadcast only elegiac music and recountings, mainly for the benefit of the younger generation of the holocaust that took the lives of six million European Jews.

More than in past years, remembrance of the holocaust was linked to the present political situation. National leaders implied that the destruction of half the world’s Jews a generation ago was by itself justification for Israel’s uncompromising stand on conditions for peace with the Arabs. Foreign Minister Abba Eban told a memorial assembly in Tel Aviv that one of the lessons of the holocaust was that “We have to regard the existence of Israel as a supreme imperative, higher than which there is none. The world can ask anything of us except jeopardizing the survival of the State that belongs to the people bereaved of millions of its sons,” he said. Deputy Premier Yigal Allon, in a statement taped prior to his departure for Washington this week, observed: “The faculty to remember is one of our distinguishing features, both as a command and as a legacy. We are the generation that has grown up in the holocaust or under its shadow. We are determined to see to it that our people shall never again be left in the lurch. The Jewish people in its homeland knows how to defend its life and liberty.” Menachem Beigin, leader of the Gahal opposition faction, said at ceremonies at Beit Jabotinsky, “The lesson of the holocaust is that when an enemy says he wants to destroy the Jewish people he should be taken at face value and we should not rely on the world’s succor.”