On social media, Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day with tributes, reflection

Politics and poignancy are evident as the country's top leaders and state institutions pause to pay homage to European Jewry.

Members of a Knesset delegation stand in front of former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during ceremonies marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. (photo credit: REUTERS)
Members of a Knesset delegation stand in front of former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during ceremonies marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
(photo credit: REUTERS)
As Israel prepares to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, government ministers and state agencies used social media to reflect on one of the year's most somber, poignant periods - the week just before Independence Day, in which Israelis take stock of the Jewish people's cataclysmic history.

On his Facebook page, President Shimon Peres posted a photograph of himself during a visit he made as prime minister to Bergen-Belsen in 1986.
 
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu used the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day to denounce the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which recently agreed to a historic reconciliation deal with its longtime rival within the Palestinian national movement, Fatah.
 
The prime minister also changed his Facebook cover photo to reflect the day.
 
Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, the Israeli politician who has made the most frequent use of his Facebook account to get his message out to constituents, posted his recollections of the first-ever visit he paid to Poland this past winter as part of a delegation of lawmakers.
 
The Israel Defense Forces used its Twitter feed to vow "Never again," a common refrain that sums up the Jewish state's vow to never succumb to the helplessness that ultimately doomed European Jewry less eight decades ago.

The United States embassy in Tel Aviv also posted a tweet expressing its solidarity with Israel as it marks Holocaust Remembrance Day.