Yad Vashem Launches Online Exhibition

Holocaust Martyrs' & Heroes' Remembrance Day 2019

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    The Central Theme for Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day 2019: The War Within the War: The Struggle of the Jews to Survive During the Holocaust 
    Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day  (Yom Hashoah in Hebrew) is a national day of commemoration in Israel, on which the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust are memorialized. 
    ​Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah in Hebrew) is a national day of commemoration in Israel, on which the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust are memorialized. It is a solemn day, beginning at sunset on the 27th of the month of Nisan and ending the following evening, according to the traditional Jewish custom of marking a day. 

    Places of entertainment are closed, and memorial ceremonies are held throughout the country. The central ceremonies, in the evening and the following morning, are held at Yad Vashem and are broadcast on the television. Marking the start of the day, in the presence of the President of the State of Israel and the Prime Minister, dignitaries, survivors, children of survivors and their families, gather together with the general public to take part in the memorial ceremony at Yad Vashem in which six torches, representing the six million murdered Jews, are lit. 

    The following morning, the ceremony at Yad Vashem begins with the sounding of a siren for two minutes throughout the entire country. For the duration of the sounding, work is halted, people walking in the streets stop, cars pull off to the side of the road and everybody stands at silent attention in reverence to the victims of the Holocaust. Afterward, the focus of the ceremony at Yad Vashem is the laying of wreaths at the foot of the six torches, by dignitaries and the representatives of survivor groups and institutions. 

    Other sites of remembrance in Israel, such as the Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz and Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, also host memorial ceremonies, as do schools, military bases, municipalities and places of work. Throughout the day, both the television and radio broadcast programs about the Holocaust. In recent years, other countries and Jewish communities have adopted Yom Hashoah, the 27th of Nisan, to mark their own day of memorial for the victims of the Holocaust.

    Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day 2019 will be on Thursday, 2 May. The State opening ceremony will be held at Yad Vashem on Wednesday, 1 May at 20:00.

    The Central Theme for Holocaust Martyrs'and Heroes' Remembrance Day 2019​ is: The War Within the War: The Struggle of the Jews to Survive During the Holocaust. 
     
    When the battles of World War I came to an end, humanity hoped that never again would another world war erupt.
     
    That hope was crushed on 1 September 1939, when the German Army invaded Poland. World War II was the largest, broadest and deadliest war in human history. At its height, it raged from one end of the world to the other, traversed continents and oceans, and impacted nearly every nation on earth. Tens of millions of people died, most of them unarmed civilians. Violence and death cast their heavy shadow over humanity, diminishing its ability to recognize and deal with a heretofore inconceivable moral collapse.
     
    It was in this battered and indifferent world that Nazi Germany sought to annihilate the Jewish people. Nazi ideology was based on an extreme racist antisemitic worldview that considered Jews a destructive race that was poisoning and undermining the very foundations of human existence. Within two years of the outbreak of war, Nazi Germany had taken control of most of Europe and North Africa. Its military achievements enabled Germany to implement the Nazi "vision" of a world without Jews. The "Final Solution" could not have been carried out other than in the context of a world war. The Nazis strove to obliterate Judaism as a religion and a culture, to eradicate the Jewish people and to wipe every Jewish man, woman and child off the face of the earth. For the Jewish people, the front lines of the war determined the boundaries of their persecution, oppression and murder.
     
    Across occupied Europe, Jews attempted in various ways to join in the armed struggle against the German Nazis and their accomplices, including by joining partisan fighters and establishing Jewish underground groups. One-and-a-half million Jews enlisted in the Allied armies and served actively in the war.
     
    During World War II, the Jews in the German-occupied territories had to struggle, both as individuals and collectively, for their very existence and for the survival of their family members and fellow Jews. They risked their lives in frequent acts of solidarity and aid for their persecuted brethren. The struggle for physical survival under the terror of Nazi German rule entailed hiding and escape, smuggling food, administering aid and social welfare, and providing medical care. Jews in underground movements all over Europe attempted to organize a wide range of rescue efforts, in order to save as many other Jews as possible.
     
    All the while, they persisted in their struggle to preserve their Jewish identity, culture and religion. Jews in the ghettos initiated clandestine educational activities, published underground newspapers, and conducted extensive and varied political activities. Observant Jews fought for communal survival, whether by gathering in prayer quora (minyanim), or by adhering, even symbolically, to the rhythm and highlights of the Jewish calendar, even in concentration camps. Jewish music continued to be played in concerts organized by culture committees in the ghettos or in the forests, with musical instruments taken on the run. Drawings, songs and stories were created and hidden away for posterity. Thus, they sought to remember the past, feel the pain of the present, and dream of the future.
     
    Remembrance through drawing, personal memoirs and documentary writing played an important role in the Jews' battle to maintain their human dignity, even on the verge of death. It was a battle for memory, a war against forgetfulness and deception. In the words of author and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld in an address at Yad Vashem on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day in 1997, "The diaries written during the Holocaust are undoubtedly the most scorching outcries ever expressed by the human soul. These cries were uttered by people of different ages, and different degrees of religious faith or secularity. This was their final attempt to preserve their identity before it was seized from them.”
     

     
     

    "Unto Every Person There is a Name"

    Six million Jews, among them 1.5 million children, were murdered in the Shoah while the world remained silent. The worldwide Holocaust memorial project "Unto Every Person There is a Name" is a unique project designed to perpetuate their memory as individuals and restore their identity and dignity, through the public recitation of their names on Yom Hashoah - Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day. By personalizing the individual tragedies of the Jewish victims of Nazi Germany and its collaborators, this project counters persistent efforts by enemies of the State of Israel and the Jewish people to deny the reality of the Holocaust and cast it as history’s seminal hoax.

    "Everyone has a name" - Poem by Zelda
    [translated from Hebrew]
    Everyone has a name
    given to him by God
    and given to him by his parents.
    Everyone has a name
    given to him by his stature
    and the way he smiles.
    and given to him by his clothing
    Everyone has a name
    given to him by the mountains
    and given to him by the walls.
    Everyone has a name
    given to him by the stars
    and given to him by his neighbors.
    Everyone has a name
    given to him by his sins
    and given to him by his longing.
    Everyone has a name
    given to him by his enemies
    and given to him by his love.
    Everyone has a name 
    given to him by his holidays
    and given to him by his work.
    Everyone has a name
    given to him by the seasons
    and given to him by his blindness.
    Everyone has a name
    given to him by the sea and
    given to him
    by his death.

    "Unto Every Person There is a Name" is conducted around the world in hundreds of Jewish communities through the efforts of four major Jewish organizations: B'nai B'rith International, Nativ, the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization. The project is coordinated by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, in consultation with the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and enjoys the official auspices of the President of the State of Israel. In Israel, "Unto Every Person There is a Name" has become an integral part of the official Yom Hashoah commemoration ceremonies, with the central events held at the Knesset and at Yad Vashem with the participation of elected officials, as well as events throughout the country.

    List of names​