Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres, Knesset Speaker
Reuven Rivlin, ministers, MKs and other government officials read names of those
who died in the Holocaust during the Knesset’s memorial ceremony on
Thursday.
The ceremony is called “Every Man Has a Name,” after a poem by
Zelda that was inspired by the Holocaust.
Twelfth Knesset speaker Dov
Shilanksy (1924-2010), a Holocaust survivor, initiated the ceremony in
1989.
Peres told the story of his birthplace, Vishniev, which was then
part of Poland but is now Belarus. His mother had five siblings, all of whom
moved to Israel except for her brother Michael Meltzer, who stayed behind to
take care of his parents. All three were killed, along with the rest of the
town’s residents, when the Nazis locked them in a wooden synagogue and burned it
down. Anyone who tried to escape the synagogue was shot.
“No house, no
school, no cemetery remained in Vishniev,” Peres said. “Nothing was
left.”
Rivlin stated that the namereading ceremony “becomes more
important every year as the number of witnesses among us becomes smaller and
smaller.”
He read the names of the victims from the town of Shklov,
Belarus, from which his mother’s family hails. He explained that the Jewish
community in Shklov was established in the 16th century, and on the evening
following Yom Kippur 1941, residents of the Shklov Ghetto were taken to
concentration camps.
The Knesset speaker pointed out that there were
victims of the Nazis whose names would never be known, such as the infant son of
Aharon and Ivgenya Kapsitzky and other young children from
Shklov.
Netanyahu said that this year’s ceremony was the first that his
father-in-law, Shmuel Ben-Artzi, who passed away in November, did not
attend.
“He would listen closely, because he thought this was a way to
give expression to the souls that were lost,” Netanyahu said. “He saw the loss
as something both personal and national, in dimensions that cannot be
described.”
The prime minister read a poem Ben-Artzi wrote in memory of
his hometown, Bilgoraj, in which he “expressed his pain over the
Holocaust.”
Opposition leader Shaul Mofaz read names of Jews killed in
the Farhoud, a Naziinspired pogrom in Baghdad in 1941, adding that “the State of
Israel must do everything to make sure the events of the Holocaust, the
genocide, do not repeat themselves.”
Supreme Court Justice Elyakim
Rubinstein read names of his family members, as did Intelligence Minister Dan
Meridor, Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman
and Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. Deputy Education Minister Menahem
Eliezer Moses choked back tears as he read the names of 70 members of his
father’s family who died in Auschwitz.
Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar
honored Janusz Korczak, the Polish-Jewish educator who directed an orphanage and
stayed with the orphans when they were sent to the Treblinka extermination
camp.
Communications Minister Moshe Kahlon and Deputy Minister for the
Advancement of Youth, Women and Students Gila Gamliel read names of those who
perished in concentration camps in Libya, from where their families
came.
MKs from the Likud, Kadima, Labor, National Union and Shas read
names. MKs Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) and Avraham Michaeli (Shas) told of family
members from Georgia who had been forced to fight in the Red Army and never
returned. MK Amir Peretz (Labor) honored Jews from Morocco who perished in
Europe.
MK Ronnie Bar-On (Kadima) concluded his name-reading with a quote
from Deuteronomy: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your way out of Egypt...
that he struck those of you who were hindmost, all the weaklings at the rear,
when you were faint and exhausted, and he did not fear God.... God gives you
rest from all your enemies around, in the Land that God gives you as an
inheritance to possess it... you shall not forget.”
At the beginning of
the ceremony, the IDF rabbinical chorus sang Zelda’s poem “Every Man Has a
Name,” after which survivors, the heads of the Knesset Caucus for Holocaust
Survivors Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi) and Ze’ev Bielski (Kadima), MK Ruhama
Avraham-Balila (Kadima) and her son, an IDF officer, lit six
candles.
After that, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, Sephardi Chief
Rabbi Shlomo Amar and IDF Chief Cantor Shai Abramson read psalms and prayers.