Netanyahu says lessons of the Holocaust guide him daily

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened Israel’s annual memorial day for the 6 million Jews systematically killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II by saying at a ceremony beginning Sunday evening that the lessons of the Holocaust guide him daily and issuing a warning to Israel’s enemies not to test it.

The Nazis and their collaborators wiped out a third of world Jewry. The state of Israel was established just three years after the end of the war, and hundreds of thousands of survivors made their way here.

Speaking at the at the main ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, Netanyahu said the lesson of the Holocaust is that “we must be able to defend ourselves by ourselves against all threats and any enemy.” He said this lesson guides him “every morning and every evening.”

Holocaust survivors and officials also gathered for memorials at sites of former concentration camps Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany and Sachsenhausen near Berlin.

Meanwhile, researchers at Tel Aviv University said in a report released Sunday that violent attacks on Jews dropped for a second straight year in 2016 — from 410 recorded cases in 2015 to 361 — but other forms of anti-Semitism are on the rise worldwide, particularly on U.S. university campuses.

The report attributed much of the drop to increased security measures in Europe including France, where there were 15 attacks compared to 72 in the previous year, and Britain, where incidents fell from 62 to 43.

ABIR SULTAN/EPA Holocaust survivor and Red Army veteran Max Pivler lights a torch at Yad Vashem.