Jerusalem commemorates Yom HaShoah
While Yad Vashem is the epicenter of Israel's national sorrow and remembrance over the Holocaust, the very nature of country means the specter of shoah is never deep below the collective awareness. Yom HaShoah is Israel's national day of mourning for the Holocaust. A ceremony will be held at Yad Vashem with the attendance of most Israeli politicians and Holocaust cognoscenti. Many around the country will light 24-hour memorial candles in remembrance at the same time.
At 10:00 AM a siren will ring out nationwide and everything will stop as the population takes two minutes to remember, honor and reflect on the unfathomable tragedy that befell our people not 70 years ago. At Yad Vashem another large ceremony will be marked with a wreath laying for the six million who perished. For the rest of the day, the nation will be in collective mourning. Most stores will close, the radio will play only sad songs or play survivors' retelling of stories from the shoah. Many communities will hold name readings and other ceremonies, both religious and secular.
Many choose to mark the day Yad Vashem. But in Jerusalem alone, there are a number of sites with both direct and tacit connections to the Holocaust that offer a unique way of remembering the catastrophe.
Right outside the Old City walls at the Diaspora Yeshiva is the Chamber of the Holocaust museum. The small space is populated with a number of pieces of European Jewish life lain victim to Nazi evil, as well as a memorial of tablets and plaques in memory of the thousands of communities destroyed.
While Oskar Schindler was a Nazi, remembering him and the 1,200 Jews he saved while risking his own life can also make for a fitting memorial. His grave, in the nearby Catholic cemetery on Mount Zion, was immortalized (as much as a grave can be) in the final scene of the Spielberg masterpiece "Schindler's List," which showed many of the people he saved and their descendants placing rocks atop his burial place.
While the Museum on the Seam has no direct connection to the Holocaust, its main focus of warning against the dangers of violence, hatred and the such are universal. There may be no better way to honor the dead than by studying and recognizing the factors that led to Shoah with the goal of preventing a future one.
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