A mix of border police, diplomats, Holocaust survivors, and their offspring sat in the fog and heavy rain on Monday morning to mark Yom Hashoah at a ceremony honoring Jewish heroes who saved other Jews from Nazi atrocities.

“Jews rescuing Jews continues to this very day… we are still yearning for the day we won’t need this resourcefulness and heroism, but this is probably still distant from us,” said Dr. Haim Katz, chairman of the B’nai B’rith World Center, one of the organizations that hosted the event.

Held jointly by KKL-JNF Jewish National Fund and B’nai B’rith World Center, the ceremony took place in “Martyrs Forest,” a woodland in the Jerusalem mountains that is home to six million trees planted by the KKL-JNF in remembrance of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Since the Jewish heroes recognized in the ceremony had since passed away, organizers bestowed certificates on the rescuers’ descendants, who went up to the stage, one-by-one, as the event moderator recanted their parents and grandparents heroic deeds.

The two Jerusalem-based organizations began hosting the ceremony 22 years ago “in an effort to help correct the generally held misconception that Jews failed to come to the aid of fellow Jews during the Holocaust.”

“To help others any time, under any circumstance you can, even to the point of heroism, this is why we commemorate Yom Hashoah but also ha’gvura (heroism),” said Sergio Barbanti, Italy’s ambassador to Israel, alluding to the full name of the memorial day — Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day.

In Israel, the phrase “sheep to the slaughter,” was frequently applied to survivors of the Holocaust, stigmatizing those who did not fight the Nazis with armed resistance as complacent in their own destruction. This narrative has become much less widespread since the first few decades of Israel’s founding.

“The narrative we learned in our schools was ‘sheep to the slaughter’ and there are plenty of reasons why that narrative took root among us, but the truth is that the Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter,” said Katz.

“Up against a destruction machine unlike anything the world had seen, they fought fiercely not just to save themselves, but to save their brothers and sisters, many times risking their lives and sometimes paying the price with their lives,” he continued.

Most of those honored in Monday’s event resisted the Nazis quietly, saving the lives of thousands of Jews by arranging hiding places and helping others avoid deportation to detention and death camps.

Among those honored were Georges and Elise Garel, a French-Jewish couple who established the “Garel Network,” an underground arm of the humanitarian organization the Children’s Aid Society, which arranged hiding places for children in France and saved some 1,600 lives.

Some of the rescuers saved numerous lives outside of organizational frameworks, like the Tunisian Jewish boxer Victor Perez, who was arrested by collaborationist forces in Nazi-occupied France.

While in Auschwitz, Perez snuck out pots of soup from the kitchen where he worked, and distributed them to starving prisoners. He was later murdered by a Nazi guard, after being sent on a death march with other prisoners to the Gleiwitz concentration camp.

Looming over each family member that went up to receive their citation was Nathan Rapaport’s “Scroll of Fire” monument, depicting the horror of the Holocaust and prophetic and redemptive imagery tied to Israeli independence which soon followed.

The ceremony, with the customary lowering of the Israeli flag to half-staff, followed by a 10 a.m. siren to mark a moment of silence, bringing the audience, and much of the country, to a halt.

For the diplomats, organization chairmen and Border Police brass that delivered speeches ahead of the certificate-giving ceremony, the Hamas massacres of October 7 were impossible to sidestep, and many invited comparisons between the two tragedies.

“Raising our voices to say never again is more necessary today than ever,” continued Barbanti. “The ferocious antisemitic massacre of October 7 represented the darkest page for the people of Israel since its foundation.”

Katz said that October 7 “revealed to us hundreds of new heroes, people we didn’t know of, who fought fiercely against evil to bring an end to the cruelty that was revealed,” and added that there are likely still many stories from Simhat Torah that are waiting to be told.

Brig. Gen. Jihad Hasan, who trains soldiers in the Border Patrol, invoked the recent Passover holiday in his assertion that Israel deals with existential threats in  “every generation, in every period.”

“The intention of our enemies has not changed, but our ability has. Our enemies stand up against strong and firm security forces that defends its civilians’ lives, security and the State of Israel at any cost,” he said.

By the end of the ceremony, rain had begun to pour heavily on the crowd as a youth acapella group led them in Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem.