By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
JERUSALEM (Worthy News) – A two-minute-long siren sounded across Israel Monday to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day between anxiety over the future of a Jewish nation faced with the ongoing war in Gaza and other threats to its existence.
Israelis across the country, including soldiers, stood in tearful silence throughout the siren, commemorating the six million Jews who perished in the 1933-1945 Holocaust, also known as the Shoah.
Millions of people from other targeted groups were also murdered by the Nazis and their allies in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
As the siren reverberated throughout areas of the Promised Land, concerns remained about Shlomo Mansour, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, one of the 133 Israelis still being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza.
The resident of Kibbutz Kissufim, in Israel’s northwestern Negev desert, survived the Nazi-inspired 1941 Farhud Pogrom in Baghdad, Iraq, when over 180 Jews were reportedly killed and 1,000 injured.
SAFE HOME
More than 80 years later, he was taken by Hamas from the State of Israel, which was supposed to provide a safe home to those who arose on the ashes of the Shoah.
As Israel remembered their fallen, places of entertainment were closed, with the central ceremonies held at Yad Vashem, Israel’s famed Holocaust remembrance center.
At Yad Vashem, wreaths were laid at the foot of the six torches lit on Sunday night by dignitaries and representatives of survivor groups and institutions.
Elsewhere, an Israeli soldier stood at the site of the Nova festival where partygoers were killed and kidnapped during the October 7 attack by Hamas terrorists from Gaza in Reim, southern Israel.
He stood in silence between the many pictures of smiling people whose lives had just begun when their joy ended in a tragedy that wounded the nation.
Copyright 1999-2026 Worthy News. This article was originally published on Worthy News and was reproduced with permission.
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