Israelis remember Holocaust victims

JERUSALEM -- Air raid sirens sounded throughout Israel on Tuesday, marking two minutes of silence, as Israelis remembered the 6 million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis and commemorated the anniversary of the best-known uprising against the Germans.

At 10 a.m. local time, sirens wailed, bringing bustling streets to a halt as motorists stopped their cars and stood beside them, a symbol of the importance of the Holocaust in the Israeli psyche, though nearly six decades have passed since the end of World War II.

Among the observances during this year's memorial day, the local Conservative Jewish movement instituted the reading of a new liturgical work, the "Shoah Scroll," at religious services.

Ancient scrolls are read on several other holy days on the Jewish calendar, but the Israeli Conservative movement bucked the practice of the dominant Orthodox stream and fashioned a new one.

Conservative Jewish leader Rabbi David Golinkin, who believes the memorial day should be turned into a day of fasting by observant Jews, said in a statement that the new scroll "provides a religious context for our need to commemorate that which must never be forgotten." Copies of the scroll were sent to Conservative Jewish synagogues around the world.

Its six chapters include testimony from a death camp survivor and an account of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, when several hundred Jews with makeshift weapons in the doomed Jewish section of the Polish capital held off German soldiers for nearly a month before the ghetto was destroyed.

The 60th anniversary of the uprising, considered the most heroic act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, was the central theme of this year's memorial day.

Newspapers printed feature articles about the uprising in the days before the observance.