JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened the country’s annual memorial day for the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust by issuing a stern warning Sunday to the world to learn the lessons of the past and prevent another Holocaust.
At the opening ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, Netanyahu linked the Nazi genocide to Iran’s suspected drive to acquire nuclear bombs, its leaders’ repeated references to the destruction of Israel and its denial of the Holocaust. Netanyahu said that just as before World War II, there are those in the world today who refused to face uncomfortable truths.
“In this place I have said many times that we must identify an existential threat in time and act against it in time, and tonight I ask, ‘Why in the years before the Holocaust did most of the world’s leaders not see the danger ahead of time?’ In hindsight, all the signs were there,” he said.
“Has the world learned a lesson from the mistakes of the past? Today we are again faced with clear facts and before a real danger. Iran calls for our destruction, it develops nuclear weapons.”
The stated links between the Holocaust and Iran indicated how more than six decades later, the mass murder of Jews during World War II is still a central part of Israel’s psyche. The nation was created just three years after the end of the war, and hundreds of thousands of survivors made their way to Israel.
Six million Jews were killed by German Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust, wiping out a third of Jews worldwide. Today, fewer than 200,000 elderly survivors remain in Israel.
The annual memorial day is one of the most solemn on Israel’s calendar. Restaurants, cafes and places of entertainment are shut down, and radio and TV programming are dedicated almost exclusively to documentaries about the Holocaust, interviews with survivors and somber music.
This morning, Israel will come to a standstill as sirens wail for two minutes. Pedestrians typically stop in their tracks, and cars and buses halt on the streets while drivers and passengers stand with their heads bowed.
Other ceremonies include the public reading of names of Holocaust victims at sites around the country, including Israel’s parliament. Schoolchildren dress in white and stop their studies to hold memorial ceremonies.
Sunday night’s main ceremony at Yad Vashem included six survivors who lit six symbolic torches to commemorate the 6 million dead. Attendees also saw a video segment on each survivor’s story.
The Israeli flag flew at half-staff, and a military honor guard stood at one side of the podium as poems and psalms were read and the Jewish prayer for the dead was recited.
Hours before the opening ceremony, an annual report by Tel Aviv University on worldwide anti-Semitism said violent attacks against Jews worldwide dropped in 2013, but anti-Semitism was becoming more widespread in Europe amid a rise in popularity of extremist parties.
Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, an umbrella group representing Jewish communities across Europe, expressed concern over the increasing popularity of far-right parties, especially in France, Hungary and Greece, where they are expected to make big gains in European Parliament elections next month.
He also mentioned the situation in Ukraine, where Jews are caught in the middle of the conflict between nationalists and Russian separatists, with both sides using anti-Jewish rhetoric while accusing each other of harboring anti-Semitic supporters.
In his comments, Israeli President Shimon Peres spoke of his own family’s destruction in the Holocaust and said Israel was the deterrence against another one happening.
“We must not ignore any occurrence of anti-Semitism, any desecration of a synagogue, any tombstone smashed in a cemetery in which our families are buried. We must not ignore the rise of extreme right-wing parties with neo-Nazi tendencies who are a danger to each of us and a threat to every nation,” he said.
Also Sunday, Netanyahu accused Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas of engaging in “damage control” by denouncing the Holocaust after agreeing to unite with the Hamas militant group that seeks Israel’s destruction.
“President Abbas has to decide whether he wants a pact with Hamas or peace with Israel,” Netanyahu said on CBS’ Face the Nation program. “He cannot speak out of both sides of his mouth.”
Abbas called the Holocaust “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era” during a meeting with a visiting American rabbi, according to the official Palestinian Wafa news agency.
“Tear up your pact with Hamas,” Netanyahu told Abbas in an interview on CNN on Sunday. “Recognize the Jewish state. Come back to a real peace process.”
Abbas’ Palestinian Authority governs the West Bank, and Hamas governs the Gaza Strip. The U.S., Israel and Europe consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization.
By expressing sympathy for Holocaust victims, “I think what he’s trying to do is damage control,” Netanyahu said of Abbas.
The statement, which grew out of a meeting last week between Abbas and a U.S. rabbi who promotes understanding between Muslims and Jews, is the first condolences by the Palestinian leader.
Abbas has been vilified as a Holocaust denier, because in his doctoral dissertation, published as a book in 1983, he challenged the number of Jewish victims and argued that Zionists had collaborated with Nazis to propel more people to what would become Israel.
A senior Israeli minister, incensed at quotations from Hitler highlighted on Facebook pages affiliated with the Palestinian Authority, denounced Abbas earlier this year as “the most anti-Semitic leader in the world” at a conference in Tel Aviv.
Abbas had already backtracked from the book, saying in a 2011 interview that he did “not deny the Holocaust” and that he had “heard from the Israelis that there were 6 million” victims, adding, “I can accept that.”
But the statement published in English and Arabic on Sunday morning by Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency, goes further, describing the Holocaust as “a reflection of the concept of ethnic discrimination and racism, which the Palestinians strongly reject and act against.”
Yad Vashem, the center for Holocaust research in Jerusalem, issued an email on Sunday afternoon that Abbas’ statement “might signal a change” from a situation in which “Holocaust denial and revisionism are sadly prevalent in the Arab world, including among Palestinians.”
At the start of peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians in late July, U.S.Secretary of State John Kerry had set an end-of-April target date for a peace deal. He later lowered expectations, calling for the outlines of an agreement and, in a last attempt, for a deal on extending the talks.
However, none of Kerry’s objectives appear within reach, and it appears unlikely talks will be salvaged by Tuesday’s deadline.
Also Sunday, speakers at an event commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust in Budapest, Hungary, called for dialogue with the government, condemning its plans for a memorial to Nazi Germany’s 1944 occupation.
Thousands took part in Sunday’s March Of The Living remembrance walk, which was held for the 12th time in the Hungarian capital.
Over the past several months, Hungarian Jewish groups have expressed their frustration at what they say are efforts by Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government to diminish the role local authorities had in the deaths of around 550,000 Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust.
Government officials have said repeatedly that Hungarians were perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust. President Janos Ader said the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, where a third of those killed were Hungarian Jews, “forms part of Hungarian history.”
Most of the reproach has been centered on a monument planned to be placed on the south side of Freedom Square, at the opposite end of a Soviet war memorial.
The structure is set to show the figure of Germany’s imperial eagle swooping down on the Archangel Gabriel, symbolizing Hungary.
Hungary was on Germany’s side during the war, but Germany invaded after Adolf Hitler became suspicious that Hungary was looking for a way out and a peace deal with the Allied forces.
In a February letter to the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, Orban promised to hold talks about the statue after Easter and pushed back the planned unveiling of the work from March 19 to the end of May.
However, two days after Orban’s Fidesz party won its second consecutive landslide victory in parliamentary elections on April 6, crews began readying the foundations of the monument.
Activists have repeatedly dismantled the fence guarding the construction area, but work has continued.
Information for this article was contributed by Aron Heller, Pablo Gorondi, Josef Federman, Karin Laub and Mohammed Daraghmeh of The Associated Press; and by David Lerman, Lisa Odenheimer and Jeff Kearns of Bloomberg News; and by Jodi Rudoren of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 04/28/2014