Yom HaZikaron LaShoah ve-LaGvurah (Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Day), as it is officially dubbed, is the State of Israel's official day of mourning for the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi regime and its allies. Israel's founding fathers, uncomfortable with how the image of Jews as helpless victims of Nazi terror jarred against the Zionist ideal of an empowered Jewry, added the "ve-LaGvurah" portion to emphasize episodes of armed resistance during the Holocaust, from Warsaw to Sobibor. The holiday was originally intended to fall on the 14th of Nisan, the Hebrew date of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, but as this happens to be the eve of Passover, the date was moved to fall in the mourning-themed Omer period between Passover and Shavuot, falling one week before Independence Day.
Yom HaShoah is not a religious holiday, so its observance takes place largely in the civil sphere rather than in the synagogue. As the 27th of Nisan begins at sundown, politicians, survivors and citizens gather at Yad Vashem, the state Holocaust memorial and museum, for the ceremonial lighting of six torches for the six million victims. The next day is marked by a pervasive melancholy; shops and restaurants are closed, flags everywhere fly at half-mast, and radio and television stations replace their normal programming with something appropriately somber.
At 10:00 in the morning, sirens blare for two minutes across the entire country and the nation grinds to a halt: People stand still on the sidewalks, and motorists stop in the middle of the road and get out of their cars to honor the slain. It is truly unlike any other holiday – watching the bustling pedestrians of the Ben Yehuda midrechov, or the frantic traffic on Highway 1, draw to a swift and complete stop is unforgettable, underscoring both the the enormity of the wound inflicted on the Jewish people by Nazi genocide and their triumph over it, a once stateless and nearly eradicated people surviving and thriving in their own country.
It should be noted that observance of Yom HaShoah's unique customs is not universal in Jerusalem: many Orthodox Jews, particularly in the Haredi and Hasidic sectors, prefer to eulogize those killed in the Holocaust on the more traditional mourners' holidays of Tisha b'Av and the Tenth of Tevet and thus go about their business normally on Yom HaShoah; for political reasons, residents of Arab-Israeli and Palestinian areas of the city also tend not to acknowledge the sirens.
