Yom HaShoah will be observed beginning at sundown tonight. It honors and remembers the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their henchmen during the Shoah (Holocaust). Between 1939 and 1945 over two-thirds of European Jewry was murdered. Among them were countless relatives of my own. The vast majority of my family that had not already left for the United States, Canada, Southern Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe) and other parts simply disappeared, murdered along with six million of our fellow Jews simply because we are Jewish.
The date, the 27th of Nisan, marks the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was selected by the Knesset (Israeli parliament) as the remembrance day for the Shoah in 1951 and has subsequently been adopted by Jewish communities across the world as our remembrance day. Today also marks the beginning of the United States' Days of Rembrance. In our country, our days of Remembrance begin the Sunday before Yom HaShoah and conclude the following Sunday.