international holocaust remembrance day 2003

The fixed Jewish calendar ensures 27 Nisan does not fall on Saturday. Observance of the day is moved back to the Thursday before, if 27 Nisan falls on a Friday (as in 2021), or forward a day, if 27 Nisan falls on a Sunday (to avoid adjacency with the Jewish Sabbath, as in 2024). The date is set in accordance with the Hebrew calendar, on 27 Nisan, so that it varies in regard to the Gregorian calendar. An amendment to the law in 1961 mandated that cafes, restaurants and clubs be closed on the day. It established that the day would be observed by a two-minute silence when all work would come to a halt throughout the country, memorial gatherings and commemorative events in public and educational institutions would be held, flags would be flown at half mast, and programs relevant to the day would be presented on the radio and in places of entertainment. On April 8, 1959, the Knesset officially established the day when it passed the Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day Law with the purpose of instituting an annual 'commemoration of the disaster which the Nazis and their collaborators brought upon the Jewish people and the acts of heroism and revolt performed.' The law was signed by the Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, and the President of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day Law (1959) From the following year, the lighting of six beacons in memory of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis became a standard feature of the official commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day. On May 3, 1951, the first officially organized Holocaust Remembrance Day event was held at the Chamber of the Holocaust on Mount Zion the Israel Postal Service issued a special commemorative envelope and a bronze statue of Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, was unveiled at Yad Mordechai, a kibbutz named for him. On April 12, 1951, after also considering as possibilities the Tenth of Tevet, the 14th of Nisan, which is the day before Passover and the day on which the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (April 19, 1943) began, and September 1, the date on which the Second World War began, the Knesset passed a resolution establishing the 27 Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, a week after Passover, and eight days before Israel Independence Day as the annual Holocaust and Ghetto Uprising Remembrance Day. In 1951, the Knesset began deliberations to choose a date for Holocaust Remembrance Day. The following year, in December 1950, the Rabbinate, organizations of former European Jewish communities and the Israel Defense Forces held memorial ceremonies around the country they mostly involved funerals, in which objects such as desecrated Torah scrolls and the bones and ashes of the dead brought from Europe were interred. A radio program on the Holocaust was broadcast that evening.

The day was marked by the burial in a Jerusalem cemetery of ashes and bones of thousands of Jews brought from the Flossenbürg concentration camp and religious ceremonies held in honor of the victims. The first Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel took place on December 28, 1949, following a decision of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel that an annual memorial should take place on the Tenth of Tevet, a traditional day of mourning and fasting in the Hebrew calendar. Origins Rabbinate-instituted day (1949–1950) It is held on the 27th of Nisan (which falls in April or May), unless the 27th would be adjacent to the Jewish Sabbath, in which case the date is shifted by a day.

The first official commemorations took place in 1951, and the observance of the day was anchored in a law passed by the Knesset in 1959. In Israel, it is a national memorial day. Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG'vurah ( Hebrew: יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה, lit.'Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day'), known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah ( Hebrew: יום השואה, Yiddish: יום השואה) and in English as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and for the Jewish resistance in that period.

International holocaust remembrance day 2003