Starting this evening, April 17, and into tomorrow evening, April 18, Israel will commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day. According to All Israel News, 147,999 Holocaust survivors live in Israel.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Day occurs on Jan. 27 every year, but the commemoration in Israel, Yom HaShoah, occurs on Apr. 17-18 because it follows the Hebrew calendar.

In January 2022, 165,800 Holocaust survivors lived in Israel, reported All Israel News. The average age of the living survivors is 85.8 years. About 60% of the survivors are women, 89,000 people.

Some of the remembrance ceremonies will be streamed on Facebook at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Center in Jerusalem. 

One of the Jewish survivors participating in the commemoration ceremonies is Tova Gutstein, who was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1933. She syated in Warsaw until the Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, when she was forced to flee into the woods, reported The Times of Israel. 

She was then taken in by partisans and, "[a]fter the war, she spent 18 months in an orphanage before finally being reunited with her mother, sisters and brother at a displaced persons camp in the German city of Ulm," said The Times of Israel.  "She moved to Israel in 1948 and became a hospital nurse. Today she is active in helping Holocaust survivors."

This evening, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will deliver remarks about Yom Hashoah. At the Yad Vashem Holocaust Center, survivors and family members will gather for a ceremony where six torches are lit, symbolizing the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. 

Tomorrow, "the ceremony at Yad Vashem begins with the sounding of a siren for two minutes throughout the entire country," said Yad Vashem on its website.  "For the duration of the sounding, work is halted, people walking in the streets stop, cars pull off to the side of the road and everybody stands at silent attention in reverence to the victims of the Holocaust."

Commenting on the remembrance, Ronit Rosin, director of the Authority for the Rights of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, said in a statement, "Over the past year, we have continued to expand our activities by making services accessible to survivors' homes, with more than 16,000 visits, and we have also helped them to assert their rights in Israel and the rest of the world. Our mission is clear and urgent: to act quickly and sensitively in order to help survivors live in the well-being they deserve."

Although the extermination of the Jewish people in Germany (and later Europe) was not a public policy in Nazi Germany in the early 1930s, it quickly evolved into one, with stricter rules, harassment, imprisonment, deportations, and eventually mass executions. 

"When they came to power in Germany, the Nazis did not immediately start to carry out mass murder," states the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.  "However, they quickly began using the government to target and exclude Jews from German society. Among other antisemitic measures, the Nazi German regime enacted discriminatory laws and organized violence targeting Germany’s Jews. The Nazi persecution of Jews became increasingly radical between 1933 and 1945."

This radicalization culminated in a plan called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," the "systematic mass murder of European Jews," said the museum. "The Nazi German regime implemented this genocide between 1941 and 1945."

An estimated six million Jews died in the Holocaust.