Israel marks Yom Hashoah

Israelis are marking Yom Hashoah, whose theme this year is “bearing witness.” Israeli leaders and foreign ambassadors gathered for a Sunday evening ceremony at Yad Vashem, which included addresses by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Acting President
Dalia Itzik, and former lawmaker and survivor Tommy Lapid.On Monday at 10 a.m. Israel time, sirens wailed throughout the country for two minutes, with Israelis standing
silently to remember the
victims.”The
Holocaust is not only a stain on the history of Germany, not only on
the history of European peoples, but a mark of Cain on all of humanity,” Itzik told the audience at the Yad Vashem ceremony.Lapid spoke of the need to act against modern genocides.”Even after the Holocaust we witnessed genocide in
Biafra, Cambodia, Rwanda, and we must cry out against the genocide
currently being committed in Darfur in Sudan – and the world is sitting
on its hands and sends a few sacks of flour, not so much in order to
feed the hungry, but rather to calm its conscience,” he said, according to Ha’aretz.Lapid, also chairman of the Yad Vashem council, added a warning regarding “an existential threat to the Jewish people on the part of the
Iranian president.”