Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today, April 16, is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Haaretz reports that

Israelis stood silently for two minutes to remember the victims of the Holocaust, as sirens wailed throughout the country on Monday morning.

Israel marked Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day with vocal concern for the plight of aging survivors, many of whom are living in poverty in Israel.

“We must never accept a reality in which even one of the Holocaust survivors in Israel is living without dignity,” Acting President Dalia Itzik declared at the opening ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, referring to reports that a third of the Holocaust survivors living in Israel live below the poverty line.

Hundreds of people, many of them Holocaust survivors, sat in rows at the central plaza at Yad Vashem for the ceremony Sunday evening, bundled up against the cold weather. A youth choir sang, and Israeli leaders addressed the somber gathering. Itzik said at the beginning of the ceremony that "the Holocaust is not only a stain on the history of Germany, not only on the history of European peoples, but a mark of Cain on all of humanity."