Yom HaShoah 2016

Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah in Hebrew) marked on 5 May.

Yom Hashoah is a national day of commemoration in Israel, on which the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust are memorialized.Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day 2016 will be on Thursday, 5 May.

The central ceremonies, in the evening and the following morning, are held at Yad Vashem and are broadcast on television. The State opening ceremony will be held on Wednesday 4 May at 20:00, in the presence of the President, the Prime Minister, the Speaker of the Knesset, and the President of the Supreme Court. The following morning, the ceremony begins with the sounding of a siren for two minutes throughout the entire country. The program of events can be found here.

The central theme of the remembrance day in 2016 is “’Everything is Forbidden to Us, and Yet We Do Everything’ - The Struggle to Maintain the Human Spirit during the Holocaust”. In the diary that he kept in the Warsaw ghetto, teacher and educator Chaim Aharon Kaplan wrote, “In these days of our misfortune, we live the life of Marranos. Everything is forbidden to us, and yet we do everything.” With these words, Kaplan expressed the struggle of the Jews to maintain their human spirit under the impossible conditions in which they found themselves under Nazi German occupation.