Posted on 04/18/2004 12:51:47 PM PDT by yonif
Holocaust Remembrance Day will begin with an official state ceremony at 8 PM this evening in Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum. Six Holocaust survivors will light torches, in memory of the more than six million Jews who were massacred in the Nazi Holocaust of 1939-1945. Commemorations will continue tomorrow with a two-minute siren in which almost the entire country will stand in silence or recite a prayer. Yad Vashem is continuing its quest to increase the names of known Holocaust victims. At present, the names of only some three million victims are known.
The stories of individual survivors whose families were decimated place in bold relief the national catastrophe of the Jewish People. For instance, Nissim Bechar, 84 years old, was sent at the age of 19 from his home in Greece to a concentration camp; his parents Yosef and Esther, as well as his married siblings Rivka, Leon, Jivia, Regina and Yehuda, and their spouses and children, were all murdered. Nissim immigrated to Israel in 1948, where he married Rivka, and is today the father of four children, and has 12 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Similarly, Tziporah Ehrenkrantz Levavi, 77, from a Hassidic home in Stry, Poland (eastern Galicia), was the only one to survive from her family of seven; her parents Hirsch Itche and Miriam, and her siblings Yossele, Sarah, Arele (Aharon) and Rachel, were all killed. Tziporah arrived in Israel in late 1945, completed her studies, went to a religious kibbutz, married Nachum Levavi - himself a lone survivor - and now has four children, 33 grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren. A resident of Masuot Yitzchak, she said,
"I don't know why I am counted among those few who survived, I don't know how I merited it. It's a question that occupies me and I don't have an answer. I would rather phrase the question like this: For what purpose did I remain alive? After I was saved, it was clear to me that there would be a purpose/meaning to my life only if it had significance - and this I found in coming to the Land, in the merit that I received to live in the period of the establishment of the State and to live in it, to live on a kibbutz and settle the Land; I merited to build a family and to live for 20 years with my husband Nachum of blessed memory who was a man of great faith, and in G-d's great kindness I merited having children and grandchildren, who walk in the path of Torah and Avodah (Torah and Work), just as I had dreamt. 'I thank You, for You answered me, and You were a salvation for me.'"
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