Israel Observes Holocaust Memorial Day amid Echoes of October 7

Israel began observing its own national memorial day for the victims of the Holocaust on Sunday, noting parallels between the horrors of Nazi Europe and the terror that Israelis endured during the Hamas attack of October 7.

As Breitbart News has noted, Israel has long observed a different Holocaust memorial day than the rest of the world, which only began commemorating the Holocaust annually after the UN declared a memorial day that falls in January.

Breitbart News explained in 2022:

The January 27 date is relatively recent, having been adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005 as the date to remember the Holocaust. It marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the most notorious site in Nazi Germany’s extensive system of slave labor and mass extermination.

However, many Jews had already memorialized the Holocaust on a different date, the 27th of the month of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar, which usually falls in April or May. The day is known as “Yom HaShoah Ve-Hagevurah” in Hebrew, which means “Day of (remembrance of) the Holocaust and the Heroism.” Unlike the 27th of January, which sees Jews only as victims, Yom HaShoah marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, a monument to Jewish resistance.

Moreover, the UN resolution designating January 27 as a Holocaust memorial includes Jews only briefly, among a list of other victims (“countless members of other minorities”). When the new Trump administration issued a statement marking International Holocaust Memorial Day in 2017 that omitted Jews specifically, critics accused Trump of “Holocaust denial,” but the oversight — which is all it was — mirrored the UN’s lack of emphasis on Jews as the primary victims of the Nazis.

Israel’s Army Radio noted that some of the survivors of the Holocaust had been victims or survivors of the October 7 attack as well. One correspondent mentioned that people who had jumped from cattle cars in Europe to avoid being sent to Nazi death camps were forced in October to leap from their windows to avoid murder or capture by Hamas.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog noted at Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial museum, via the Times of Israel:

“Throughout the decades that have passed since the Holocaust, we assured [ourselves] time after time: ‘Never again,’ and we swore that the Jewish people would never again stand defenseless and unprotected. And yet, despite all that, the horrors of the Holocaust shook us all during the October massacres, echoing in all our hearts,” Herzog says.

…

“October 7th was not a Holocaust because today we have the State of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces. Although the results of the tragedy and the shock still haunt us; we don’t forget that what our brothers and sisters who perished in the Holocaust could only dream of, only imagine: a country and an army of our own. An army that even now fights in a battle that has not yet ended – for our national home. The home of national independence.”

“I say this with complete and absolute conviction — despite the disaster and mourning that still afflicts us: nothing can destroy this home,” he continues. “This people, our people, who endured the most terrible Holocaust of all, and built for themselves sovereignty in their homeland two millennia after being exiled from it by force — nothing can erase them.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also commented at Yad Vashem:

In the terrible Holocaust, there were great world leaders who stood by idly; therefore, the first lesson of the Holocaust is: If we do not defend ourselves, nobody will defend us. And if we need to stand alone, we will stand alone.

Therefore, we will defend ourselves in every way. We will overcome our enemies and we will ensure our security – in the Gaza Strip, on the Lebanese border, everywhere.

Israel has also declared a new memorial day for the anniversary of October 7, which will be observed later this year.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.