“The lessons of Jewish history teach that when our existence is threatened, we must take our fate into our own hands,” Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said in a letter to the military ahead of the Jewish state’s Holocaust and Heroism Day, which is observed from Monday evening into Tuesday.
“Today, on Holocaust and Heroism Day, we all gather and unite with the memory of the six million of our people who perished in the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators,” Zamir wrote, addressing fellow commanders, soldiers and civilian employees of the IDF.
Yom Hashoah serves to commemorate “the communities that were erased from the face of the earth; the voices of the boys and girls, the men and women, the elderly and the young, who were led to the death pyres and shot in killing pits; and the partisans and underground fighters who struggled and rose up even when it seemed all hope was lost,” the chief of staff continued.
“From the ashes, the loss, and the devastation, a clear cry arose: to be a free people in our land. Holocaust survivors yearned for a state—they rose and built it with bare hands and with deep faith,” he said. “From the day of its establishment, the State of Israel has stood before a real existential threat.”
Zamir noted that on Oct. 7, 2023 , “our criminal enemies attacked the State of Israel and attempted to realize this threat,” murdering some 1,200 people, primarily civilians, in the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
“Since then, for more than two years, the IDF has been operating without pause in a fateful campaign to remove existential threats, significantly harm our enemies, and fortify security,” he wrote, saying that the acts of heroism seen during the multi-front War of Redemption “will be engraved in the history of the State of Israel.”
“We who wear the uniform of the IDF carry with us a legacy passed down from generation to generation—a legacy of a spirit that refuses to break, of a people that chose life and freedom even in its darkest hours. Now it is our turn to be a vital link in the chain of defenders who came before us; to stand guard over the homeland, to defend our home, and to ensure that the memory of the past will be our compass—Never Again,” Zamir concluded.
Israel will come to a standstill on Tuesday morning, when a two-minute siren will sound nationwide at 10 a.m. in honor of Yom Hashoah.
Established in 1951, Yom Hashoah is observed annually on the 27th of the Hebrew month of Nissan. The siren tradition began in the 1960s and has become one of the nation’s most solemn national rituals, with public ceremonies, educational programs and survivor testimonies set to take place throughout the day.
