Opening of Holocaust Memorial Day – 2009

The official state ceremony to mark the Memorial Day for the Shoah and Heroism 2009 was held in the presence of the State President, Shimon Peres, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the speaker of the Knesset, Reuven Rivlin, the President of the Supreme Court, Dorit Beinish and also in the presence of the Chief Rabbis and government ministers.

After the lowering of the flag to half mast, Avner Shalev, the chairman of the board of Yad VaShem lit the memorial flame. The President and the Prime Minister delivered speeches focusing on children in the Shoah. The representative of the survivors this year was the chairman of the board of Yad VaShem, former Chief Rabbi Meir Lau. He remembered his time as a child in the ghetto and in the concentration camp. However he began his words with the story of a child from another Shoah - Moses, survivor of the Shoah of the children of Israel in Egypt. He began with a moving midrash that explained the words in the Book of Exodus describing Pharaoh's daughter who found the basket in which the infant Moses, three months old at the time, lay: "she saw the child (yeled), the young man (na'ar) was crying" (Exodus 2:6). Indeed he is a small child but he cries like a young man which means that he understands the danger of crying aloud and so he cries silently from fear and despair. In his memories of those days of terror, he told stories of the heroism of the children who often provided for their families, keeping them alive during the Shoah. Rabbi Lau ended by emphasizing that the children (and more than a million and a half died in the Shoah)  were the heroes of the Shoah.

In the ceremony there was also music - songs of Ahinoam Nini and of the Ankor girls' choir and a trio of young violin players. The actress Yevgenia Dodina read short excerpts from the writings of the victims. The chief military cantor prayed the traditional prayer for the dead "El maleh rahamim" (God full of mercy) after the reading of a psalm by the Chief Sephardic Rabbi Shlomo Amar and the recitation of Kaddish (the prayer for the dead) by Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger.

The peak of the ceremony was the lighting of the six torches by seven survivors, all who were children of between 6 and 8 years old when the war began. One torch was lit by twin sisters who survived the medical experiments on twins in Auschwitz. It is interesting to note that the first torch was lit by a survivor who emphasized the role of the local church and monastery in saving her and the heroic role of the Christian family that took her in, risking their own lives. The Prime Minister also mentioned the role of churches and monasteries in saving children during the Shoah.

Father David Neuhaus, the Vicar of the Hebrew speaking communities, was invited to the ceremony and attended alongside the Papal Nuncio, Mgr. Antonio Franco. In a few weeks time, Pope Benedict will visit Yad VaShem.

To view the entire ceremony on the Yad VaShem website: View and listen