“Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.”
Isaiah 49:15
Dear Friends,
In this edition of Israel in Focus, we continue to share the stories behind the headlines, to give you a deeper understanding of the struggles, sacrifices, and triumphs unfolding here in Israel.
There are moments in history that break the world open. The Holocaust was one of them. And every year, on the 27th of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar, the State of Israel stops to remember.
This year, Yom HaShoah, Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, falls on April 14. That is one week after the final day of Passover. And that proximity is not coincidental. It is sacred.
Passover is the celebration of deliverance. It is the story of a people brought out of slavery into freedom, carried through the wilderness by the hand of God. And then, just days later, Yom HaShoah arrives to hold a very similar story alongside the first: the story of a people who, 3500 years after the Exodus, still found themselves hunted and murdered on the soil of Europe.
The resemblance is painful. It is also deeply intentional.
When the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, began deliberating in the early 1950s about how to memorialize the six million Jews murdered under Nazi Germany and its collaborators, there was considerable debate. Some called for the remembrance to fall on the 10th of Tevet, a traditional day of mourning and fasting in the Hebrew calendar. Others advocated for the 14th of Nisan, the date of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In the end, the Knesset chose the 27th of Nisan, a date that falls between Passover and Israel’s Independence Day, to link memory, mourning, and the miracle of national rebirth in one continuous arc. The first official commemorations took place in 1951, and the date was formally enshrined in law by the Knesset in 1959.
The full name of the day tells the whole story: Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG’vurah, Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. It is not only a day for weeping. It is also a day for honoring the fighters, the resisters, the men and women who refused to go quietly into the dark, including those who rose up in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. That uprising began on Passover eve. Even in the shadow of annihilation, there was courage.
What the End of the War Actually Looked Like
When Allied forces moved into Europe in the spring of 1945 and began liberating the concentration camps, the scenes they encountered were beyond comprehension. Soldiers found the dead in open fields. They found the living barely distinguishable from the dead. They found children who had known nothing but hunger, fear, and wire fences.
But liberation, as long-awaited as it was, did not mean freedom. Not yet.
The survivors, known in Hebrew as She’erit ha-Pletah, the surviving remnant, were largely unable to return to the homes and villages they had left. Those who tried were often met with hostility. Antisemitic violence continued across Eastern Europe even after the Nazi defeat. In Poland alone, antisemitic gangs murdered approximately 1,500 Jewish survivors in the months immediately following liberation. Many who went back to their homes found strangers living in them and received no welcome.
More than 250,000 Jewish displaced persons ended up in camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy, camps that were sometimes built on the very grounds of former Nazi facilities. The doors of most nations remained tightly closed. The United States maintained restrictive immigration quotas. British-controlled Palestine turned away ships carrying survivors, sometimes interning the passengers in detention camps in Cyprus.
A survey taken among Jewish refugees in Italy found that 76 percent had lost every member of their immediate family, parents, siblings, and children. They were single survivors of families entirely wiped out. They had been liberated from death, but they had nowhere to call home.
And yet, even in those bleak displaced persons camps, something extraordinary began to happen. Schools were established. Newspapers were printed. Theater troupes toured the barracks. Marriages were formed. Children were born. A people that had been brought to the edge of extinction began, with breathtaking determination, to rebuild.
Many of them would eventually make their way to Israel, the land that had waited for them. With the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, the doors opened. By 1953, an estimated 170,000 Jewish displaced persons had immigrated to Israel. The surviving remnant had come home.
How Israel Observes Yom HaShoah
Today, every April, Israel marks this history in a way unlike any other nation on earth.
Yom HaShoah opens the evening of Nisan 26, with a state ceremony at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. The President and Prime Minister deliver addresses. Holocaust survivors, whose numbers grow smaller with each passing year, light six torches representing the six million who perished.
Then, the following morning at 10:00 a.m., the sirens sound.
For two minutes, the entire country stops. Cars pull to the side of the road, and drivers step out to stand in silence on the asphalt. Factories go quiet. Schoolchildren pause in their classrooms. Markets and offices hold still. Across Israel, from the Galilee to the Negev, the air fills with the sound of a siren and then, for two full minutes, only silence.
It is one of the most moving expressions of collective memory in the modern world. A nation standing together, in a country that exists precisely because the world once looked away, refusing to forget.
Throughout the day, schools hold ceremonies. Military bases mark the occasion. Television and radio broadcast documentaries, testimonies, and programs about the Holocaust. Places of entertainment are closed by law. Flags fly at half-mast. Communities gather to light candles in memory of the six million lives taken, and to speak the names of those who are no longer here to speak for themselves.
Leah’s Story
Among the survivors Vision for Israel has been privileged to walk alongside is a woman we have come to know named Leah. Born in Romania during the chaos of wartime, her childhood was stolen in an instant. Her father was taken. Her family was forced into hiding, moving from their home to a stable, and then to the basement of a neighbor who risked everything to provide false identities and help them escape to a remote village.
That neighbor was later honored as Righteous Among the Nations.
Leah survived. But the end of the war did not bring ease. Her family eventually made aliyah to Tel Aviv, but the scars of what she had lived through did not leave with the boat. For years, she struggled with depression, with the deep weight of trauma she had never been able to fully lay down. Widowhood compounded her isolation. Health challenges mounted. And yet, she endured.
It is because of supporters like you that VFI has been able to stand with women like Leah, providing practical aid but more than that: providing the gift of human connection. Of being seen. Of not being forgotten.
As Yom HaShoah approaches this April 14, we are thinking not only of the six million who were lost but of those who lived and are still with us. Holocaust survivors in Israel are aging. Their needs are real and present. And their stories, which once burned inside them alone, must now be carried by all of us.
What Vision for Israel Is Doing
At Vision for Israel, our care for Holocaust survivors is woven into our mission year-round. We provide material assistance, food, and basic necessities to elderly survivors who live on fixed incomes and often cannot meet their own needs without help. We support social workers and volunteers who make personal visits, offer companionship, and ensure that survivors are not left isolated and alone. At this time of year especially, we provide financial gift cards for Passover. And throughout the year, we host warm, personal events at the Millennium Centre for these precious survivors who have been through so much.
If the story of the six million stirs something in your heart, if the image of a woman like Leah, who survived the impossible and built a life in the land of her ancestors, moves you to act, then please stand with us now.
Your gift today can provide dignified care for a Holocaust survivor in Israel. It can be the hand that reaches across decades of suffering to say: "You are not forgotten. You are loved. We see you.”
Please give today and stand with the survivors of Israel.
With deepest reverence and love,
Barry & Batya
