Israeli embassy moves its Holocaust ceremony online

The Embassy of Israel will hold a Holocaust remembrance ceremony on Wednesday to mark the United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in honour of the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazi regime.

The ceremony, to be broadcast on the “Israel in Thailand” page on Facebook, will begin at 10am with opening remarks by the Ambassador of Israel in Thailand, Meir Shlomo, followed by a message from the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.

The virtual event will also feature a screening of Whose Child Are You?, a documentary based on the testimony of the Dutch Holocaust survivor Tswi Herschel, who was sent to the Sobibor extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, along with his family.

Mr Tswi emigrated to Israel in 1986, and since 1991, he has been actively sharing his story all over the world.

The ceremony is scheduled to conclude with a closing performance by a Thai-Italian opera singer, Monique Klongtruadroke, who will be performing Shtiler, Shtiler (“Hush, Hush”) — a lullaby composed by 11-year-old Alek Volkoviski with lyrics in Yiddish by Shmerke Kaczerginski.

The lullaby, which is one of the best-loved songs to have come out of the Vilna ghetto in Vilnius, Lithuania, was first performed in 1943, shortly before the ghetto’s liquidation by authorities.

The poignant lyrics recount the murder of more than 70,000 Jews in Ponar, a forest near Vilna, and lament the pain and suffering endured by the ghetto’s residents.

“A deficient knowledge of the history of the human race is a perfect breeding ground for racism, discrimination and hate, and maybe the next genocide… As hard and as challenging as it is, the only effective antidote to racism, anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination is education,” Ambassador Shlomo said.