The Jews of Israel completed tonight a 24-hour period of mourning in memory of the 6, 000, 000 European Jewish men, women and children slaughtered by the Nazis during the war.
Tel Aviv, gaily illuminated usually, was darkened last night, and its streets almost deserted, as all places of entertainment closed at 7 p.m. Memorial meetings were held throughout Israel. One major meeting was held for Yiddish-speaking Jews, mostly survivors of the European Nazi-controlled ghettoes and former partisan fighters.
Another state memorial mass meeting was held with Gideon Hausner, former Attorney General and prosecutor of Adolf Eichmann, as the principal speaker. The events of the meeting were broadcast over Kol Israel, with former inmates describing their experiences in the Nazi murder camps. A long-distance participant was a former Jewish inmate of the Sobibor death camp, a former Russian army officer named Pitzarsky, whose address was recorded with the aid of the Soviet Broadcasting Services and broadcast at the meeting.
Public buildings lowered flags to half-staff, and memorial candles were lighted in thousands of homes where families remembered their dead. All traffic and work was halted for two minutes this morning. The traditional Holocaust Day ended with an official observance in Jerusalem tonight.
Among those taking part in the observance on Remembrance Mount were President Zalman Shazar, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, members of the Cabinet, Knesset and Diplomatic Corps and thousands of Jerusalem residents. In an address at the gathering, Premier Eshkol said that "never again will the shadow of the holocaust darken the pages of Jewish history. " He stressed that history commands the mobilization of all Jewish resources in the cause of a new Jewish life symbolized by Israel.
Sharply rejecting the view heard recently that the European Jewish communities did not adequately resist the Nazi extermination program, the Premier said that the history of the holocaust also refutes the "evil charge" that it was easier to carry out the daughter because the Jewish communities were organized.
Other speakers included Arieh Kubovy, head of the Yad Vashem Center for Documentation of the Holocaust; and Shalom Cholavsky, a ghetto fighter. In an earlier ceremony, in the presence of Deputy Premier Abba Eban, the cornerstone was laid for a Heroism Monument on Mount Remembrance.
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