Israel prepares for Holocaust Remembrance Day - Preparations begin for 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Israel prepares for Holocaust Remembrance Day - Preparations begin for 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.(JPost).Preparations are underway across the country for the observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins on Sunday evening.

The central theme of this year’s ceremony is defiance and rebellion during the Holocaust, Yad Vashem announced, marking 70 years since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Memorial activities will begin with a state ceremony at Yad Vashem’s Warsaw Ghetto Square at 8 p.m., during which President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will deliver addresses. Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird will also be in attendance.

Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev will light a memorial torch, followed by Holocaust survivors Otto Pressburger, Eliezer Eizenschmidt, Miriam Liptcher and Baruch Kopold who will light torches. Sima Hochman will light the first torch in place of her husband, Peretz, who passed away last week.

Chief Rabbis Shlomo Amar and Yona Metzger will recited traditional Jewish prayers of mourning and remembrance and Cantor Azi Schwartz will sing a prayer for the souls of the martyrs.

The theme of heroism will be on further display at the Ghetto Fighters’ House in the Galilee on Sunday, with another six survivors lighting memorial torches at a ceremony that organizers believe will draw 10,000 attendees.

The survivors chosen to light torches are:

Dr. Lucien Lazare, a former member of the French underground;

Aviva Blum Waks, the daughter of Warsaw Ghetto fighter Avraham Blum; 

Semion Rozenfeld, a captured Red Army soldier who took part in an uprising in the Sobibor concentration camp; 

Yehuda “Poldek” Maymon, a member of the Polish resistance and a retired Israeli naval officer who was interned in Auschwitz; 

Julian Zanoda, an Algerian Jew who at age 10 took part in the underground revolt that facilitated the American invasion and prevented the destruction of Algerian Jewry; 

and Shimon Zuckerman, the son of Yitzhak “Antek” Zuckerman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and deputy to Mordechai Anielewicz.

Yad Vashem chief archivist Dr. Haim Gertner told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday that he believed that he and his researchers would “come close” to compiling the names of all six million Holocaust victims within the next three years.Hmmmm......'Never again'.Read the full story here.