"The State of Israel of today is not only the only possible memorial standing for our perished brothers and sisters. Israel is a deterrence against any attempt at another Holocaust,'' said Israeli President Shimon Peres as Israel marked Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Memorial Day.
''A strong Israel is our response to the horrors of anti-Semitism, but it does not excuse the rest of the world from its responsibility to prevent this disease from returning to their own homes,'' he added.
During a state ceremony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Peres marked the 70th anniversary of the destruction of Hungarian Jewry and noted that anti-Semitism is again on the rise.
''We must not ignore the rise of extreme right-wing parties with neo-Nazi tendencies, which are a danger to each of us and a threat to every nation,'' Peres told a crowd of thousands, in a reference to the extreme-right Jobbik party’s rise in recent years.
“The president of Hungary will take part tomorrow in the March of the Living in Poland, a gesture deserving of admiration,” the President said. “However, 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.
''As a member of the Jewish people I may not and I cannot forget the horrors of the Holocaust.As a citizen of Israel I will do everything in my power to ensure that the Nazis will not rise again. As a human being I will do everything in my power to bring peace between peoples; between races; between religions; between nations.”
Peres recounted the murder of Budapest’s Jews at the banks of the Danube, which was “painted red” with the blood of Jewish men, women and children.
“Children were tied to their mothers, the young to the elderly. The bodies of the victims are pushed into the chilling, foaming waters of the Danube,'' he said.
During the ceremony in Yad Vashem, Israel's Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau read psalms for the dead while Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef recited kaddish for the martyrs and IDF chief cantor Lt.-Col. Shai Abramson sang the El Malei Rahamim prayer.
Former chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, himself a survivor and the chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, lit a memorial torch, while six survivors – Asher Aud, Zvi Michaeli, Dita Kraus, Chayim Herzl, Hinda Tasman and Itzchak Biran – lit torches, each of which represented one million victims.
Videos of the survivors recalling their stories and detailing their lives after making aliya were shown prior to the kindling of the torches.
The theme of this year’s ceremony was life on the edge, expressing the situation in which European Jewry found itself in 1944.
According to Yad Vashem, that was the “year in which everything depended on the scales of time, and the Jews remaining in Europe were asking themselves: Will the Red Army from the east and the Allies from the west arrive before the Germans come to murder whoever is still alive?”
While Yad Vashem is usually reluctant to weigh in on political matters, the Holocaust museum issued a statement on Sunday in response to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s statement calling the Holocaust “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era.”
“Holocaust denial and revisionism are sadly prevalent in the Arab world, including among Palestinians,” and thus such a statement “might signal a change, and we expect it will be reflected in PA websites, curricula and discourse,” the Holocaust Memorial and Institute said in a statement.
Sunday night's ceremony at the Yad Vashem memorial started 24 hours of commemorations. Six million Jews were killed by German Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust, wiping out a third of world Jewry.
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.
On Monday morning, Israel came to a standstill as sirens wail for two minutes. Pedestrians typically stop in their tracks as cars and buses halt on and passengers stand on roads with heads bowed.