Video - Israeli PM Netanyahu's Remarks at Yad Vashem

Video - Israeli PM Netanyahu's Remarks at Yad Vashem. HT: The Yeshiva world.

“My responsibility as Prime Minister of Israel is to ensure that the State of Israel will never again be threatened with destruction. My responsibility is to see to it that there will not be a reason to build additional memorial sites such as Yad Vashem.

The pending agreement with Iran is an agreement that endangers the State of Israel. It leaves Iran with the capabilities that will allow it to arm itself with nuclear weapons, one bomb at first and afterwards many atomic bombs. We cannot live with such an agreement; therefore, we oppose it. Even those who try to challenge us within our borders will discover that we are ready to respond with force. Israel views with utmost gravity the attack against it from Syrian territory. Those who play with fire will get burned.

Preserving the memory of the Holocaust is more important today than ever before.

We live in an age of resurgent and violent anti-Semitism, and commemorations like this ceremony remind us where humanity’s oldest and most enduring hatred can lead.

Many thought that after the horrors of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism would finally contract and disappear.

That has not happened.

Hatred of the Jews appeared to take a brief respite after World War II for a few decades.

It has now returned in full force.

Once again in Europe and elsewhere, Jews are being slandered, vilified and targeted just for being Jews.

This is taking place in the intolerant Middle East and in the very heart of the liberal and tolerant West.

It’s taking place in Tehran and Paris, in Gaza and Brussels. Around the world, Jewish communities are increasingly living in fear.

But it’s not just the Jewish people that is being slandered, vilified and targeted. It’s the Jewish state as well.

Israel is assaulted with the same slurs and libels that have been leveled at the Jews since time immemorial.

Islamist extremists have incorporated the most outrageous anti-Semitic calumnies into their murderous doctrine.

Take the Hamas Charter as one example of many.

It reads like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Semitic forgery on which it is based. It calls for the murder of Jews and the destruction of their state.

Just as classic anti-Semites portrayed the Jew as the embodiment of all evil in the world, today’s anti-Semites portray the Jewish state in the same twisted manner.

And what do the so-called ‘enlightened’ organs of the international community do in response?

A quarter of a million people are slaughtered in Syria, poison gas is used against civilians, and who do the signatories to the Geneva Convention urgently meet to discuss? Israel.

Across the region, dictatorial regimes and brutal movements brutalize their peoples – suppressing women, lynching gays, forcing Christians to live in fear.

And who does the Human Rights Council of the United Nations condemn? Israel.

Hamas fires thousands of rockets at our civilians, deliberately targeting our people while hiding behind Palestinian civilians it uses as human shields.

And who does the ICC announce it will examine? Israel.

No rational examination of the facts could justify this assault on Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy, the most beleaguered democracy on earth.

This obsession with the Jewish people and their state has a name. It’s called anti-Semitism.

Some things just don’t change.

But I can tell you today what has changed.

We have changed.

The Jews have changed.

We are no longer a stateless people endlessly searching for a safe haven.

We are no longer a powerless people begging others to protect us.

Today we are an independent and sovereign people in our ancestral homeland.

Today we can speak out against the hateful voices of those seeking our destruction.

Today we can protect ourselves and defend our freedom.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The ayatollahs in Iran, they deny the Holocaust while planning another genocide against our people.

Let me be clear.

The Jewish people will defend itself by itself against any threat.

That’s what the Jewish state is all about.

Nonetheless, we appreciate the support of our friends around the world who reject the spreading twin diseases of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. They’re one in the same.

We are especially grateful for the bipartisan support for Israel across the United States, our great ally.

We share a special bond with the United States, which is built on common values and it’s reflected in our expansive cooperation, especially on matters of security.

Yet it is the Government of Israel that holds the ultimate responsibility for the security of the one and only Jewish state.

And here we must speak out and must speak our mind about the dangers to our people and our state. This is something we could not do at the time of the Holocaust.

Israel will reject any agreement that leaves Iran as a nuclear threshold state.

Regrettably, our understanding is that the offer made by the P5+1 does exactly that.

It would enable Iran to breakout to a nuclear weapon within a few months and many more bombs within a short time.

The capabilities of Iran to produce enriched uranium for atomic bombs are left intact.

Such an agreement is sure to spark a nuclear arms race in the region that would turn the Middle East into a nuclear tinderbox.

And such an agreement is simply unacceptable to Israel. We will oppose it and we will oppose it vigorously.

On this day of Holocaust remembrance, I pledge to you what we could neither say nor do 70 years ago.

Israel will always do what needs to be done to ensure the security of the Jewish people and the one and only Jewish state. That is the significance of this day.

Thank you.”

"Gone By The Wind" - Official Obama 'farewell' ceremony nixed due to sand storm.

"Gone By The Wind" - Official Obama 'farewell' ceremony nixed due to sand storm.(JPost). US President Barack Obama was on his way to Ben Gurion airport on Friday afternoon as his three-day visit to Israel came to a close.

The last stop on Obama's tour of Israel and the West Bank was the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where Christians believe Jesus was born. Obama's visit to the site is seen as a message of solidarity to dwindling Christian communities in a turbulent region.

Due to strong winds and sand storms Obama changed his plans to fly to Bethlehem in a helicopter, opting instead to travel in a convoy of cars. Highway 1 between Jerusalem was blocked between the hours of 13:30 and 16:00. Additionally, Obama's official farewell ceremony from Israel's Ben Gurion airport was cancelled due to a sand storm that has enveloped central Israel. Instead, there will be a small ceremony which will take place on the tarmac.

Earlier Friday, while visiting Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial Obama said the state of Israel does not exist because of the Holocaust, but because of its strong existence the Holocaust will never happen again.

The statement marked a significant corrective to his speech in Cairo in 2009, where he appeared to argue that the legitimacy of the Jewish state stemmed from the Holocaust.

Wearing a kippa, Obama rekindled an eternal flame next to a stone slab above ashes recovered from extermination camps after World War Two. "We have a choice to acquiesce to evil or make real our solemn vow - never again," Obama said.

Obama made clear he recognized that Jewish roots to the Holy Land were centuries-old. "Here on your ancient land, let it be said for all the world to hear, the state of Israel does not exist because of the Holocaust, but with the survival of a strong Jewish state of Israel, such a Holocaust will never happen again," he said.

The president said that one could visit the memorial 1,000 times, "and each time one's heart would break."

Obama began the third and final day of his first presidential trip to Israel with visits to the graves of Theodor Herzl and Yitzhak Rabin, accompanied by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres.

Obama laid a wreath and stone at the graves of the founder of Zionism, and the slain prime minister, who has become a symbol for the peace process, before touring Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. At Rabin's grave, Obama paid his respects to family members of the late prime minister, including daughter Dalia Rabin and his granddaughter Noa Rotman.

"Sometimes it is harder to embark on peace than to embark on war," Rabin's daughter, Dalia, quoted Obama as telling the family at the grave site.

Hmmmm........The Lord works in mysterious ways. Must be in a hurry to get him out of Israel before the Sabbath starts.Read the full story here.

More here on the Live blog of Times Of Israel

Video - The Auschwitz Album the only surviving visual evidence of the process of mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

HT: The AstuteBlogger.HT: Pitchforkpatriots

                            Click on here to visit this most important Web Site.

The Auschwitz Album is the only surviving visual evidence of the process of mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is a unique document and was donated to Yad Vashem by Lilly Jacob-Zelmanovic Meier.
The photos were taken at the end of May or beginning of June 1944, either by Ernst Hofmann or by Bernhard Walter, two SS men whose task was to take ID photos and fingerprints of the inmates (not of the Jews who were sent directly to the gas chambers). The photos show the arrival of Hungarian Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia. Many of them came from the Berehovo Ghetto, which itself was a collecting point for Jews from several other small towns.

Text of Netanyahu’s Holocaust Remembrance Day speech.

                                                   photo credit: Miriam Alster/Flash90

Text of Netanyahu’s Holocaust Remembrance Day speech.(TimesOfIsrael).Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address at Yad Vashem on Wednesday, April 18, Holocaust Remembrance Day. (Official Prime Minister’s Office translation from the Hebrew.) Yesterday morning, I visited an old-age home for Holocaust survivors. There, I met Idit Yapo, an amazing woman of 104, clear and lucid. I dit fled Germany shortly after Hitler gained power, in 1934. I met 89-year-old Esther Nadiv, one of Mendele’s twins. She was reading a book, Golda Meir’s biography, and she told me, with a glint in her eye, she said: “I am so proud, so very proud to be a part of the State of Israel which is in constant development.” I met Hanoch Mandelbaum, an 89-year-old survivor of Bergen-Belsen. Shortly after he came to Israel, as a young carpenter, he helped construct the desk upon which Ben Gurion signed the Declaration of Independence. That is MiSho’a liTkuma – from holocaust to resurrection. And I met Elisheva Lehman, an 88 year-old Holocaust survivor from Holland, who was a music teacher. I asked Elisheva if she would play something for us and she did. She enthusiastically played “Am Yisrael Chai” and we all sung together. It was quite emotional. Ladies and Gentlemen, Am Yisrael Chai [The nation of Israel lives] Our enemies tried to bury the Jewish future, but it was reborn in the land of our forefathers. Here, we built a foundation for a new beginning of freedom, hope, and creation. Year after year, decade after decade, we built the foundations of our country, and we will continue to yearly strengthen the pillars of our national life.
On this day, when our entire nation gathers together to remember the horrors of the Holocaust and the six million Jews who were murdered, we must fulfill our most sacred obligation. This obligation is not merely an obligation to remember the past. It is an obligation to learn its lessons, and, most importantly, to apply them to the present in order to secure the future of our people. We must remember the past and secure the future by applying the lessons of the past. This is especially true for this generation – a generation that once again is faced with calls to annihilate the Jewish State.
One day, I hope that the State of Israel will enjoy peace with all the countries and all the peoples in our region. One day, I hope that we will read about these calls to destroy the Jews only in history books and not in daily newspapers. But that day has not yet come. Today, the regime in Iran openly calls and determinedly works for our destruction. And it is feverishly working to develop atomic weapons to achieve that goal. I know that there are those who do not like when I speak such uncomfortable truths. They prefer that we not speak of a nuclear Iran as an existential threat. They say that such language, even if true, only sows fear and panic. 
I ask, have these people lost all faith in the people of Israel? Do they think that this nation, which has overcome every danger, lacks the strength to confront this new threat? Did the State of Israel not triumph over existential threats when it was far less powerful than it is today? Did its leaders have any qualms about saying the truth?
David Ben Gurion told the people of Israel the truth about the existential dangers they faced in 1948 when five Arab armies tried to snuff Israel out in its cradle. Levi Eshkol told the people of Israel the truth in 1967 when a noose was being placed around Israel’s neck and we stood alone to face our fate. And when they heard these truths, did the people of Israel panic or did they unite to thwart the dangers? Were we paralyzed with fear or did we do what was necessary to protect ourselves. I believe in the people of Israel – and this belief is based on our experiences. I believe that the people of Israel can handle the truth. And I believe that they we have the capability to defeat those who seek to harm us. Those who dismiss Iran’s threats as exaggerated or as mere idle posturing have learned nothing from the Holocaust. But we should not be surprised. There have always been those among us who prefer to mock those who tell uncomfortable truths than squarely face the truth themselves. That is how Zev Jabotinsky was received when he warned the Jews of Poland of the looming Holocaust. This is what he said in 1938, in Warsaw: “It is already THREE years that I am calling upon you, Polish Jewry, who are the crown of World Jewry. I continue to warn you incessantly that a catastrophe is coming closer. I became grey and old in these years, my heart bleeds, that you, dear brother and sisters, do not see the volcano which will soon begin to spit its all-consuming lava… I see that you are not seeing this because you are immersed and sunk in your daily worries… Listen to me in this twelfth hour: In the name of G-d! Let anyone of you save himself, as long as there is still time, and time there is very little.” But the leading Jewish intellectuals of the day ridiculed Jabotinsky, and rather than heed his warning, they attacked him. This is what Sholem Asch, one of our nation’s greatest writers, said about him: “What Jabotinsky is now doing in Poland is going too far. His statement is detrimental to Zionism and to the vital interests of our people… It is disgraceful that these are leaders of a nation.”
I know there are also those who believe that the unique evil of the Holocaust should never be invoked in discussing other threats facing the Jewish people. To do so, they argue, is to belittle the Holocaust and to offend its victims. I totally disagree. On the contrary. To cower from speaking the uncomfortable truth – that today like then, there are those who want to destroy millions of Jewish people – that is to belittle the Holocaust, that is to offend its victims and that is to ignore the lessons.
Not only does the Prime Minister of Israel have the right, when speaking of these existential dangers, to invoke the memory of a third of our nation which was annihilated. It is his duty. There is a memorable scene in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah that explains this obligation more than anything. In the harsh existence in the Warsaw Ghetto, Leon Feiner of the Bund and Menachem Kirschenbaum of the General Zionists met with Jan Karski from the Polish World War II Resistance Movement. Jan Karski was a decent, sensitive man, and they begged him to appeal to the conscience of the world against the Nazi crimes. They described what was happening, they showed him, but to no avail. They said: “Help us. We have no country of our own, we have no government, and we even have no voice among the nations” They were right. Seventy years ago the Jewish people did not have the national capacity to summon the nations, nor the military might to defend itself. But today things are different. Today we have an army. We have the ability, the duty and the determination to defend ourselves. As Prime Minister of Israel, I will never shy from speaking the truth before the world, no matter how uncomfortable it may seem to some.
I speak the truth at the United Nations; I speak the truth in Washington DC, the capital of our great friend, the United States, and in other important capitals; And I speak the truth here in Jerusalem, on the grounds of Yad VaShem which are saturated with remembrance. I will continue to speak the truth to the world, but first and foremost I must speak it to my own people. I know that my people is strong enough to hear the truth. The truth is that a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat of the State of Israel. The truth is that a nuclear-armed Iran is an political threat to other countries throughout the region and a grave threat to the world peace. The truth is that Iran must be stopped from obtaining nuclear weapons. It is the duty of the whole world, but above and beyond, it is OUR duty.
The memory of the Holocaust goes beyond holding memorial services; it is not merely a historical recollection. The memory of the Holocaust obligates us to apply the lessons of the past to ensure the basis of our future. We will never bury our heads in the sand. Am Yisrael Chai, veNetzach Yisrael Lo Yeshaker [The Nation of Israel Lives, and the Eternal one of Israel does not Lie].Source.

Anne Frank's Tree will continue to inspire for hope in Israel.

              Caption reads: "From this window Anne Frank was watching the Chestnut tree.

Anne Frank's Tree will continue to inspire for hope in Israel.HT: Giyus. This is a sad story about a girl in hiding and the tree she could see from her window which gave her hope.
Three times in Anne Frank's widely read diary, the young Holocaust victim wrote about a tree. She could see it from the attic window of the secret annex where her family hid for two years, before being betrayed.
The tree that inspired Anne Frank stood at the same place until a storm toppled it in August 2010.
In her diary Anne wrote on February 23, 1944 - "From my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be."
The tree has actually been sick for the last 10 years.As a battle raged between city officials that wanted to cut it down and activists that insisted it stay, the Anne Frank museum began to collect chestnuts from the tree to grow seedlings, so that pieces of the original tree could take root and flourish elsewhere.
One of those saplings will now be planted at Yad Vashem, near the Children’s Memorial and International School for Holocaust Studies.
In her last note about the tree Anne Frank wrote - "Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It’s covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year.” Sadly she didn't survive the holocaust to enjoy more springs. But her memory lives on through her diary and now her tree will live longer as well.
Click here to leave your leaf in Anne's tree - a leaf of goodness and hope against hate and evil.Hmmm.........“In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.”   
 ~      Anne Frank, Read the full story here.

Overnight video - Holocaust Remembrance - Day 27 January

Victims of the Holocaust deserve our remembrance.(TheAustralian).ON November 1, 2005, the UN general assembly resolved that each year January 27 would be designated Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date was significant. It was on this day in 1945 that the largest concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by Soviet forces.With 104 states co-sponsoring the resolution, including Australia, the UN's action was widely acclaimed. It may have taken 60 years to get there, but the message was clear.
The international community is determined to ensure the most horrific episode in the history of mankind is neither forgotten nor repeated.So today on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2012 we gather to commemorate the six million Jews who perished and millions of others who lost their lives including Polish and Romani civilians, homosexuals, people with disabilities, political and religious leaders and Soviet and other prisoners of war, at the hands of the brutal Nazi war machine.

Make no mistake: these people were not casualties of war but the victims of an evil, ideological crusade, a crusade designed to systematically eliminate the Jewish people and achieve what Yehuda Bauer has called "a global-racial hierarchy with the Nordic peoples of the Aryan race on top".
In this sense the Holocaust was unique in scale and scope.

With its origins in the anti-semitic Volkisch movement and morphing into the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht and ultimately the Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution, the Nazi campaign knew no bounds. Every one of the 11 million Jews in Europe including those in states that were neutral or at war with Germany were marked for destruction. It didn't matter if you were one of the more than three million Jews in Poland or one of only 200 in Albania, you were on (Holocaust architect) Adolf Eichmann's list.
In the end more than 90 per cent of Polish Jews were killed, 75 per cent of those in Germany and more than 50 per cent in Hungary, Romania and Belgium. These numbers include up to 1.5 million children, some of whom were exposed to the most horrific medical experiments. To think the German people were unaware of these calamities misses a fundamental point.
Millions of Germans were involved in this effort. From the bureaucrats to the bankers, from the teachers to the train drivers and of course the many German corporations that provided the means for exterminating millions of people, these civilians, like the soldiers in uniform, were not simply following orders. They were accomplices.
That is why, now more than 70 years on, we the descendants of Holocaust victims need to ensure the perpetrators of these horrible crimes see justice, however late. There is no defence for what took place.
That is why we must also do all we can to educate today's younger generation about the horrors of the Holocaust, for if we don't the tragedies of the past are doomed to be repeated.
Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia and Bosnia were not isolated acts of violence, but were genocides too, orchestrated and committed on a grand scale for which the lessons of the Holocaust proved no deterrent. It is against acts like these that the international community must redouble its efforts to prevent in the future.
So too, must the international community stand up to dangerous leaders like Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he threatens to wipe Israel off the map. The day after Iran has a nuclear weapon will be too late for action, for Iran will have at its disposal the technology to destroy in five minutes what the Germans took five years to nearly achieve.

Equally, we must actively confront those who seek to deny the Holocaust ever took place. It is historical revisionism of the worst kind. From Iran's hosting of an international conference on the subject in 2006, to a spattering of pseudo academics in France, Britain and the US who seek to give credibility to their claims, the attempts to deny the facts of the Holocaust are neither benign acts born of ignorance nor simple mischief making. Rather it is something far more sinister and far more deliberate.

In 1945 when a shocked general Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander, first saw the horrors of the camps he knew a time would come when those at home would say "the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda". He made it his duty then and there to bring journalists and legislators to the site to bear witness, assembling the evidence to prove what in fact occurred.

Eisenhower did his part to ensure "there is no room for cynical doubt" and we must do ours, by ensuring those who peddle falsehoods about the Holocaust are exposed at every turn.
This is our challenge. To constantly remind the peoples of the world that among the good there is also evil.

Communities that can produce the minds of Hegel and Mozart and the hearts of Schindler and Bonhoeffer can also produce the twisted and perverted thinking of Eichmann and Mengele, Himmler and Hitler.

When Soviet troops walked into Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945, one of the darkest chapters in the history of mankind may have ended. But it is now up to us to remind the world the book will never be closed.
To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson from nearly 200 years ago, eternal vigilance is the price of our freedom. This is our task, this is our responsibility.

Josh Frydenberg is the member for Kooyong and the keynote speaker at Melbourne's Jewish Holocaust Centre Memorial Day event.Read the full story here.