The Knesset convened in special session today to mark the 30th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and to memorialize the victims of the Nazi holocaust. Six candles, each representing one million Jews who died at Nazi hands, were kindled on the Speakers rostrum.
Other Remembrance Day ceremonies will be held this evening at Mt. Herzl with the participation of President Zalman Shazar and Deputy Premier Yigal Allon. Memorial ceremonies were held in other cities and towns, each of them addressed by a Cabinet Minister or other public figure.
The scene in the Knesset was solemn as Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir spoke. He likened the outrages committed today by the Black September with those of the Nazis three decades ago. “There is no difference between what the Nazis did and what the Black September is doing,” he said. “Both want to annihilate and to strike at the very being of the Jewish people.”
A brief commotion was precipitated when Communist MK Meir Wilner objected to references by Knesset Speaker Israel Yeshayahu to the mistreatment of Jews in the Soviet Union. Wilner shouted from his seat that the Speaker had no right to refer to Soviet Jews on this occasion. Premier Golda Meir shouted back at him to be quiet. Nissim Eliezer, an Independent Liberal MK, asked Wilner, “Is this why you came here today?”
Addressing a memorial assembly in Haifa, Gen. Chaim Laskov (Res.) claimed that a quarter of a million Jews from Central and Eastern Europe fought against the Nazis as partisans during World War II. He said that neither the French, the Belgians, the Russians nor the Poles could claim such a record. Laskov said that whoever tried to portray European Jews as lambs led to the slaughter was doing them and their memory a grave injustice.
The Army officer, who is chairman of the Israeli ex-Servicemens Association, noted that a half million Jews served in the ranks of the U.S. Army and a similar number of Jews served in the Soviet Army. Even the tiny Jewish population of Palestine which numbered 450,000 people, sent 30,000 young men and women to the British Army, he said. The lesson to be learned from the holocaust, Laskov observed, is that the only way to peace and survival “is to stand up in strength against everyone who tries to destroy us.”
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