JERUSALEM — The mournful wail of air raid sirens pierced the air on Monday, bringing hectic Israel to a standstill as the country built on the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust remembered the 6 million Jews who perished in World War II.
Looming over Israel's annual memorial for the Holocaust dead was its fear of a nuclear attack by Iran — and Israel's prime minister used the occasion to upbraid the world for not curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Melancholy music floated over the airwaves and tales of the fast-dwindling number of Holocaust survivors dominated the media as the world's largest survivor community mourned the dead. Schools and military bases held memorial ceremonies, and restaurants, cafes and theaters were shuttered. During the two-minute siren heard across the land, drivers switched off their engines and others stopped their daily activities to stand at attention.
The front page of the Yediot Ahronot daily carried a black-and-white photo of a bearded Polish Jew, wrapped in a prayer shawl, kneeling before two Nazi soldiers, his arms raised, fists clenched, before he was executed.
The man was the maternal grandfather of Meir Dagan, chief of the Mossad spy agency, who told the newspaper: "I see that photo every day and vow that something like that will not happen again."
At the memorial day's opening ceremony Sunday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu derided the world's response to Iran's nuclear program as "limp" and drew a link to the Holocaust.
" If we have learned anything from the Holocaust, it is that we must not be silent or be deterred in the face of evil," Netanyahu said.
Like the West, Israel thinks Iran is trying to build bombs and does not believe Tehran's claims that its nuclear program is peaceful. Israel considers a nuclear-armed Iran an existential threat, particularly in light of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's repeated references to the Jewish state's destruction and Tehran's support for Israel's bitterest enemies.
President Barack Obama issued a statement Sunday honoring the memory of "those who endured the horrors" of the Nazi atrocities and calling on all people to prevent genocide and "confront anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms."
Sixty-five years after World War II, about 207,000 aging survivors, many of them destitute and alone, live in Israel, down 63,000 from just two years earlier.
Yad Vashem, Israel's state Holocaust memorial authority, picked "Voices of the Survivors" as the theme of this year's commemoration, which began Sunday night with a state ceremony and continues through Monday evening.
" The voice of the survivors is the link that binds the painful and tormented history of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to the future, to hope and to rebirth," Yad Vashem said on its Web site.
At the Israeli parliament on Monday, Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres, other officials and survivors read names of loved ones who perished. The reading is an annual rite known as "Every Person Has Name" that tries to break down the 6 million number into stories of individuals, families and communities wiped out during the war.
At Yad Vashem, officials and survivors laid wreaths at the monument to the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, the largest Jewish insurgency during the Holocaust, ultimately crushed by the Germans.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center on Monday praised Germany for bringing accused Nazi war criminals John Demanjuk and Heinrich Boere to trial over the past year, but said a "lack of political will" continues to be the major obstacle to punishing others, particularly in post-Communist Eastern Europe.
The center singled out Hungary's failure to try Sandor Kepiro, whom it accuses of organizing the mass murder of at least 1,200 civilians in Serbia in 1942.
Efraim Zuroff, who coordinates the center's research on Nazi war criminals, said at least 77 Nazi war criminals have been convicted since January 2001 and hundreds of new investigations have been initiated. The statistics, Zuroff says, defies the widespread assumption that it is too late to bring Nazi murderers to justice.