By Stan Goodenough
Apr 30, 2008
Although never far from their collective and - in decreasing numbers individual - memories, the genocide of Europe's more than six million Jews was set to be revisited by Israel's 5.5 million sons and daughters of Abraham Wednesday, as the nation whose state was reborn out of the very ashes of Auschwitz prepared to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day.
For 24 hours, until sunset Thursday, Israelis will saturate themselves with images, films, interviews, news reports, special gatherings and school assemblies, and a two-minute-long nationwide siren designed to pause them in memory how one out of every three of the world's Jews was murdered at Nazi hands.
About 250,000 Holocaust survivors are still alive in Israel today, according to The Jerusalem Post.
A torch-lighting ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem will start the special day for this people which, more then any other in history, has been hated and targeted for destruction just because of who they are as a nation.
While the numbers crushed in Hitler's death machine were unprecedented, they were "only" the largest batch of victims who have fallen prey to Jew-hatred down the centuries.
Today's Israeli Jews know that the same hatred endures, seething in the hearts of tens of millions of Arabs and Muslims around and among them.
As Hitler sought to exterminate the Jews of Europe, and ultimately of the whole world, so Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the leaders and citizens in the Arab world dream and plan to exterminate the Jews in Israel.