The central commemoration of this year's Holocaust Remembrance Day - Yom Hashoah - was held at Zagreb's Mirogoj cemetery on Sunday, drawing members of the Zagreb Jewish community and other members of the public and Croatian state officials, who paid tribute to six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Yom Hashoah - Devastation and Heroism Day - is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar and it is marked with ceremonies and according to an established ritual every 27th of Nissan ever since 1951, when the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, made a decision to that effect in order to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the spring of 1943, said Ognjen Kraus, president of the Jewish Community of Zagreb (ZOZ) and of the national body coordinating Jewish communities in Croatia.
This year Jews around the world, including those at the commemoration at the Mirogoj cemetery, remember those who survived the horrors of the Holocaust. There are a million Holocaust survivors around the world and 800 in Croatia.
In a brief address to the commemoration, Holocaust survivor Mirjana Radman said that she was lucky to have survived the Jasenovac concentration camp as a little girl, but that she lost 27 members of her family in the Holocaust. She also said that the memory of Holocaust victims imposed an obligation to build a better world so that the Holocaust did not happen to anyone ever again.
ZOZ president Ognjen Kraus said that Holocaust survivors did not receive any benefits from the Croatian state, noting that the Jewish community could care more adequately for them if Jews were given back their property of which they had been dispossessed in World War II. In the 20 years of the Croatian state, almost nothing has been done in terms of giving Jews back their property, he said.
In line with a project launched by Jerusalem's Yad Vashem memorial centre to name each of the six million victims of the Holocaust, including a million and a half children, so that they are not forgotten, every year the Book of Names is read for certain lengths of time in an effort to remember those that died in the Holocaust.
The chief rabbi of ZOZ, Luciano Mose Prelevic, and Gregor Kurtovic said a prayer for Holocaust victims at Mirogoj today.
The commemoration at the Mirogoj cemetery was attended, among others, by President Ivo Josipovic, Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor, Parliament Deputy Speaker Josip Friscic, representatives of the diplomatic corps and religious communities in Croatia and of the Jasenovac Memorial Area, as well as representatives of the Serb and Roma minorities.
The Jewish religious community Beth Israel commemorated Yom Hashoah at the Jewish cemetery Dubovac in Karlovac, a city 50 kilometres south of Zagreb.
Wreaths were laid at the cemetery by President Josipovic's envoy Ankica Marinovic, Parliament Deputy Speaker Ivan Jarnjak, Culture Minister Bozo Biskupic, Beth Israel president Ivo Goldstein, and former President Stjepan Mesic.
Before Rabbi Kotel Da-Don said Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, Beth Israel president Ivo Goldstein addressed those attending the ceremony.
He recalled that between 5.5 and 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
Karlovac was chosen as this year's place of commemoration of Holocaust victims as a sign of gratitude to the city authorities for maintaining the Jewish cemetery, Goldstein said.
According to the 2001 population census, there was only one Jew in Karlovac at the time, said Goldstein, recalling his childhood in Karlovac and giving a few impressive examples to show the contribution of Jews to the town's development. After 1945, he said, 51 Jews returned to Karlovac, but the small Jewish community eventually emigrated to other countries.
