Holocaust Remembrance Day is being marked in Israel

April 12, 2010 - 13:01 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day; it is being marked in Israel and Jewish diasporas worldwide.

Six torches were lit for the six million Jews who were killed by the Nazis during World War II. Flags around the country were lowered to half staff. Places of entertainment are closed. There are ceremonies at schools and army bases, and radio and TV programs are focusing on the Holocaust.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that the Jewish state faces a new threat of annihilation - from Iran.

"The leaders of Iran are rushing to develop nuclear weapons," Mr. Netanyahu said. "They openly declare their intention to destroy the State of Israel."

The prime minister said the world's reaction to the Iranian threat has been weak and is fading.

Mr. Netanyahu did not repeat his country's threats to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. But he said that if Jews have learned anything from the Holocaust, it is that they must not be silent or deterred in the face of evil, VOA News reported.

The Holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

The slaughter was systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory in what are now 35 separate European countries. It was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than seven million Jews in 1939. About five million Jews were killed there, including three million in occupied Poland and over one million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Greece. The Wannsee Protocol makes clear that the Nazis also intended to carry out their "final solution of the Jewish question" in England and Ireland.