Netanyahu Says Allies Could Have Saved 4 Million Jews From Holocaust
Image by Getty Images
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel opened its Holocaust Remembrance Day with a ceremony during which six Israeli Holocaust survivors lit torches in memory of the six million Jews who died in the Shoah 70 years ago.
The ceremony was held on Sunday night at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his address cited newly released documents from the United Nations showing that the Allies were aware of the Nazis’ systematic extermination of the Jews at least two years earlier than previously known, and that if they had acted on that information at the time could have saved some 4 million of the Jewish Holocaust victims.
“When terrible crimes were being committed against the Jews, when our brothers and sisters were being sent to the furnaces, the powers knew and they did not act,” he said.
He also invoked Syria, calling U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Syrian targets in response to a chemical attack on civilians as a “point of light.”
President Reuven Rivlin opened the ceremony by saying that the Holocaust cannot be universalized but it also can not be the only lens through which we view the rest of the world.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
