Israelis and Jews around the world have marked Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Ha’Shoah). Sirens wailed across Israel in tribute to victims of the Shoah. Drivers shut off their engines and pedestrians halted on sidewalks for two minutes marking the country's official memorial day for the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis. Movie theaters and other places of entertainment shut down at sundown on Wednesday and local radio and television stations shifted to programming focused on the Holocaust.
In Poland, thousands of youths from 52 different countries took part in the annual March of the Living, a journey between the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. March of the Living chairman Shmuel Rosenman told the Israeli news service ‘Ynet News’: "I have been March of the Living chairman for 20 years. The first march was in 1988, and since then I have felt that the desire to take part in the march is constantly rising. This year we even had to turn participants away, because 11 to 12 thousand people arrived, among them 3,500 who are not Jewish. There is an amazing feeling here. People have even come from Cuba and Peru."
