Opening of Holocaust Memorial Day – 2010

The official state ceremony to mark the Memorial Day for the Shoah and Heroism 2010 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 the Chief Rabbis and government ministers.

After the lowering of the flag to half mast, Rabbi Meir Lau, the chairman of the board of Yad VaShem, lit the memorial flame. He was liberated from the concentration camp on April 11, 1945, exactly 65 years ago. Both the President and the Prime Minister delivered speeches focusing on memory. The representative of the survivors this year was Chana Weiss, a survivor originally from Fiume in Italy.

In the ceremony there was also music - songs of Gali Atari and of the Ankor girls' choir. The actor Lior Ashkenazi read short excerpts from the writings of the victims. A cantor prayed the traditional prayer for the dead "El maleh rahamim" (God full of mercy) after the reading of a psalm by the Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger and the recitation of Kaddish (the prayer for the dead) by Chief Sephardic Rabbi Shlomo Amar.

The peak of the ceremony was the lighting of the six torches by seven survivors, all who were children when the war began.

Father David Neuhaus, the Vicar of the Hebrew speaking communities, was invited to the ceremony and attended alongside the Papal Nuncio, Mgr. Antonio Franco and Greek Catholic Archbishop Jules Zreyi.

To read about the ceremony on the Yad Vashem site: View and read