Israel held a day of remembrance on Thursday for the 6 million Jewish men, women and children murdered by Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust.
Sirens sounded for two minutes in the morning. Cars stopped in the street and people stood still to commemorate the dead.
Afterwards, a remembrance ceremony with top Israeli officials and German Bundestag President Bärbel Bas began at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Bas laid down a wreath in the name of Germany's federal parliament.
She was the first high-ranking representative from Germany to attend a separate ceremony in Israeli parliament where the names of victims of the Holocaust were read out.
Earlier in the Knesset, Bas lit a candle in memory of Irma Nathan, a Jewish woman who was deported from her hometown of Duisburg 80 years ago. Nathan was murdered by the Nazis in 1942 during World War Two. Her husband and two children were also killed by the Nazis.
At the official opening ceremony in Yad Vashem on Wednesday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett stressed the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
"Even the worst wars today are not the Holocaust and are not comparable to the Holocaust," he said, according to a statement. "The Nazis aspired to hunt down all Jews and exterminate every last one of them."
According to national authorities, 161,400 Holocaust survivors are still alive in Israel with an average age of 85.5 years. More than 1,000 of them are older than 100. According to the data, there were 15.2 million Jews worldwide as of the end of 2020, with the largest number - 6.9 million - in Israel.
