From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Thousands gather at Auschwitz museum ahead of March of the Living commemoration
Cnaan Lidor is The Times of Israel's Jewish World reporter
OŚWIĘCIM, Poland — On Israel’s national Holocaust Remembrance Day, several thousand people, most of them Jewish, are gathered at the museum of the Auschwitz-Birkenau former death camp that the Nazis built near the town.
Belonging to dozens of delegations from multiple countries and Jewish communities and youth movements, the crowd of about 9,000 people is here to attend the 35th March of the Living – an annual commemorative march that follows the three-kilometer route from the camp’s infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate to the Birkenau site, which housed the camp’s two main gas chambers.
This year’s theme is Jewish heroism, an acknowledgment of the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which is marked Wednesday. The largest act of armed resistance by Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, the uprising is to many a powerful sign of defiance.
As in previous years, the march features seven torchbearers – six for each million Jews murdered and another one celebrating the birth of the State of Israel. Two of the bearers are US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides and his immediate predecessor, David Friedman. They jointly will bear a torch for the security of the State of Israel.
To Mark Wilf, an American businessman and chairman of the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel, tells The Times of Israel that the participation of Nides, a Democrat, and Friedman, a Republican, is “a powerful sign of bipartisan unity on Israel and the significance of commemorating the genocide.” Wilf, too, is among the torch bearers, representing the Jewish Agency.
Haim Taib, an Israeli businessman descended from Tunisian Holocaust survivors, will also bear a torch to commemorate, for the first time as part of the March of the Living’s official program, the Holocaust in North Africa.
Other high-profile participants include Education Minister Yoav Kisch, Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi David Lau, Italian President Sergio Mattarella, and Ahmed Al Mansoori, a former member of the United Arab Emirates Federal National Council, who founded the Gulf country’s first Holocaust exhibition in one of his art galleries in Dubai.
President Isaac Herzog is scheduled to attend a commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the Polish capital tomorrow.
