Israel began observing its own national memorial day for the victims of the Holocaust on Sunday, noting parallels between the horrors of Nazi Europe and the terror that Israelis endured during the Hamas attack of October 7.
As Breitbart News has noted, Israel has long observed a different Holocaust memorial day than the rest of the world, which only began commemorating the Holocaust annually after the UN declared a memorial day that falls in January.
Breitbart News explained in 2022:
The January 27 date is relatively recent, having been adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005 as the date to remember the Holocaust. It marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the most notorious site in Nazi Germany’s extensive system of slave labor and mass extermination.
However, many Jews had already memorialized the Holocaust on a different date, the 27th of the month of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar, which usually falls in April or May. The day is known as “Yom HaShoah Ve-Hagevurah” in Hebrew, which means “Day of (remembrance of) the Holocaust and the Heroism.” Unlike the 27th of January, which sees Jews only as victims, Yom HaShoah marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, a monument to Jewish resistance.
Moreover, the UN resolution designating January 27 as a Holocaust memorial includes Jews only briefly, among a list of other victims (“countless members of other minorities”). When the new Trump administration issued a statement marking International Holocaust Memorial Day in 2017 that omitted Jews specifically, critics accused Trump of “Holocaust denial,” but the oversight — which is all it was — mirrored the UN’s lack of emphasis on Jews as the primary victims of the Nazis.
Israel’s Army Radio noted that some of the survivors of the Holocaust had been victims or survivors of the October 7 attack as well. One correspondent mentioned that people who had jumped from cattle cars in Europe to avoid being sent to Nazi death camps were forced in October to leap from their windows to avoid murder or capture by Hamas.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented:
In the terrible Holocaust, there were great world leaders who stood by idly; therefore, the first lesson of the Holocaust is: If we do not defend ourselves, nobody will defend us. And if we need to stand alone, we will stand alone.
Therefore, we will defend ourselves in every way. We will overcome our enemies and we will ensure our security – in the Gaza Strip, on the Lebanese border, everywhere.
Israel has also declared a new memorial day for the anniversary of October 7, which will be observed later this year.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
