JERUSALEM – A long line of international dignitaries visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and President Biden’s visit Wednesday was not his first.
As vice president in 2010, he toured the site’s Holocaust History Museum, Hall of Fame, Children’s Monument, and Memorial Hall, where he participated in a memorial service, and where eternal fire is ignited by a crypt containing the ashes of Holocaust victims, in memory of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War.
At the time, Mr. Biden emotionally told how, as a young father, he took his sons one by one at the age of 15 to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. Founded in Germany in 1933, it was liberated 12 years later by the US military. Mr. Biden said he wanted his sons to understand “the possibility that humans can be so brutal.”
This time, the president’s visit to Yad Vashem could provide a resounding reaffirmation of the human spirit and capacity for survival.
After arriving there on Wednesday, Mr. Biden donned a black kippa and met with Yad Vashem’s president, Dani Dayan, a former settler leader who served as Israel’s consul general in New York.
At a memorial service, Mr. Biden rekindled the eternal flame. A children’s choir performed “Walking to Caesarea,” a 1942 poem by Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian Jewish resistance fighter during World War II. It was turned to music in 1945, a year after Mrs. Szenes was captured behind enemy lines and executed.
A cantor also read a Jewish prayer for the souls of Nazi victims, and Mr Biden was presented with a memorial plaque: a copy of the painting created by a disaster survivor. Holocaust artist, Moshe Perl, shortly after the liberation of the Dachau camp. .
“We must never, never forget, because hatred is never defeated, it is only hidden,” he wrote in the memorial’s visitors’ notebook.
The president and his delegation of American and Israeli officials also met with two Holocaust survivors, Rena Quint and Giselle Cyclowicz, who survived various concentration camps and after the war, immigrated to the United States. Miss Quint, as a child during the Holocaust, and Miss Cycowicz, a young teenager, are part of a dying generation that can testify to Nazi atrocities.
As the two women sat in their chairs, Mr. Biden knelt down to level with them, talked to them for a few minutes, clasped hands and kissed them on the cheek – again different from the security adviser’s suggestion earlier in the day. country that the president will Avoid physical contact such as shaking hands during his four-day trip, citing the fast-spreading new coronavirus sub-representative.
Later, 95-year-old Cycowicz said: “When I came to America, I didn’t know a soul there. And I met a lot of friends and now I have been invited to meet the most important person in the world.” Quint, 86, said, “Did you see the president hug me? He asked permission to kiss me and he kept holding my hand.”
Earlier, Mr. Dayan had told Mr. Biden that he was afraid – when the first lady, Jill Biden, was not present – that the US leader would fall in love with two women. Mr. Biden, looking emotional, replied, “I do – they know it!”
When he left, he gave them a kiss.
