Nation's leaders recite 1,000 victims' names
By Nina Gilbert

(May 3) - The nation's leaders gathered at the Knesset yesterday for Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day's "Unto Every Person There is a Name" ceremony.

This year's ceremony marked the generations of the Jewish family that suffered from the Holocaust.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg, Finance Minister Avraham Shohat, Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein, and a number of MKs and former MKs recited the names of their relatives and spouses's family - including siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, who perished in the Holocaust.

Their relatives alone amounted to as many as a thousand victims.

Barak's grandparents were taken from the Warsaw Ghetto and sent to Treblinka. Others in his family were also killed.

MKs from all parts of the House, including Arab MKs, attended the ceremony, in which six candles were lit in memory of the Six Million.

The guests at the ceremony in the Knesset's Chagall Hall included survivors, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Holocaust victims, youth groups, and IDF soldiers.

The ceremony began with the recitation of the Zelda poem "Unto Every Person There is a Name."

Sephardi Chief Rabbi Eliahu Bakshi-Doron said many families do not have anyone to recite Kaddish for them, but were remembered yesterday by the country.

Ministers and MKs read names of victims from countries not usually associated with the Holocaust. Communications Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who immigrated from Iraq, read the names of young people who were killed in pogroms there.

Other victims whose names were recited were sent to the death camps in Europe or murdered during unrest were from Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, Yugoslavia, and Azerbaijan.

The names of five young people living in Palestine who went to Europe to visit relatives and never came back were also noted.

Yad Vashem officials called on the public to fill out Pages of Testimony documenting the names and personal histories of Holocaust victims. Some 350,000 names have been registered since last year.

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