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Israelis light memorial candles for the opening ceremony for Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day, at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem last night. (AP)
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| By israelinsider staff and partners May 5, 2005 |
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| Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon speaks at the ceremony at Yad Vashem last night. (AP) |
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The March of the Living, which today moves into its 18th year, will for the first time alter its focus.
In response to complaints by the Polish government, Israel announced that it is overhauling the focus of its youth missions to Nazi death camps in Poland, telling participants that Poles were not the main culprits in the Holocaust.
Every year since 1988, thousands of Israeli high school students have made pilgrimages to Auschwitz and other death camps to forge a personal link to the Nazi murder of six million Jews, and to commemorate the infamous Nazi "death marches" in which thousands of camp inmates died while being forced to walk in the freezing Polish forests toward the end of the war.
But Israel and Poland began working to change the Israeli youth missions after Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski visited Israel in March and urged its leaders to focus on the history of Polish Jewry, officials said.
A pilot exchange program for Israeli and Polish high school students is awaiting final approval in Israel. The sides are planning more meetings between the youth during upcoming trips to Poland, said Noah Shalev, the Education Ministry official in charge of the program.
Shalev said Israeli and Polish officials want to ensure one message is clear: Germans carried out the Holocaust. "German Nazis were the perpetrators but a great deal of it occurred on Polish soil," Shalev said. "Some (Polish) people have a feeling they are being blamed and we are making an effort to change this."
Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich said it's also important for Israeli youth to be exposed to the rebirth of Polish Jewry in the past few years. "In fact they should be in contact not only with the tragic Jewish past or the prewar glory years of Jewish life, but also with the renaissance of Jewish life in today's Poland and to dialogue with local Polish non-Jews," Schudrich said.
He said Polish Jews need the contact with Israelis to strengthen their fledgling community.
Nimrod Barkan, a Foreign Ministry official involved in overhauling the youth missions, said he decided to make changes after his own daughters participated and told him their main interaction with Polish society was in an outdoor market.
Meeting Poles and studying the prewar Jewish community can give Israelis a truer picture of Poland's role in the Holocaust and Jewish history, he added.
"We all know the history of anti-Semitism in Poland. No one is going to deny or change that, but we want to create a more balanced image," Barkan said.
Poland has a long history of anti-Semitism but it was home to 3.5 million Jews before World War ll, the largest population of Jews in Europe. Most of them were killed in the Holocaust. Today about 20,000 Jews live in Poland.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will lead Poland's President Alexander Kwasniewski, Israeli Ministers Yitzhak Herzog and Limor Livnat, Holocaust survivors and around 18,000 participants from around the world, on "March of the Living," a 10-kilometer (6-mile) march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, where a ceremony will be held in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The day, which marks the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, officially opened in Israel last night, with a government ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, attended by Sharon and President Moshe Katsav.
"I'm traveling with Holocaust survivors that survived the horrors and chose to make Aliyah to Israel and build their homes here," said Sharon at Yad Vashem. "I requested they bring their grandchildren -- IDF soldiers -- along with them to 'The March of the living'.
"They will stand at Birkenau with uniformed soldiers, however this time they will not be enemy soldiers... they will be the grandchildren of survivors who are IDF soldiers today, Israel's protective shield," he said. "The Jews will never be homeless again. Never again will we be unprepared, never again."
Among participants is Yosef Broshi, 82, a survivor of Auschwitz traveling with Sharon to Poland today. "I didn't want to go back, not even to the town I was born in," said Broshi, who grew up in the village of Pruzhany in what is today's Belarus. The number 98882 is tattooed on his arm from his year in Auschwitz.
Broshi returns to Auschwitz for the first time since 1944, when the Germans moved him from the camp to a rifle factory. Accompanying him is his grandson, Nimrod, an 18-year-old private in the Israeli army.
"It's like showing the world that we live, and we survived and we have a story to tell and something to say," Broshi said.
Before returning to Israel, the PM will meet with Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka and possibly also Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany.
The AP contributed to this report.
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