Isaac Herzog at the Knesset ceremony
Isaac Herzog at the Knesset ceremonyAmos Ben Gershom/ GPO

In honor of Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, Israeli President Isaac Herzog laid a wreath Thursday morning at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum, and then participated in the “Unto Every Person There Is a Name” ceremony at the Knesset, where he read the names of relatives killed in the Holocaust.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is being held this year on the theme of, “Transports to Extinction: The Deportation of the Jews during the Holocaust.”

The President read the names of family members killed in the Holocaust and shared their individual stories in brief.

He then remarked, "In their memory; in memory of the 10,000 Jews of the Łomża Ghetto in Poland, murdered and massacred and exiled to Auschwitz in January 1943, like lambs to slaughter. Łomża was the birthplace of my grandfather, Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog, and where a glorious Jewish community had flourished for centuries."

"In memory of the family of my late mother Aura Herzog’s uncle, the late Prof. Hersch Lauterpacht from Lviv, the only survivor from his family, who became a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials on behalf of the Allies and one of the founders of modern international law.

"In memory of my late father Chaim Herzog’s aunt, Sonia Epstein, and of her husband and her son.

"In memory of my late mother-in-law Tzvia Afek’s uncle, Yaakov Rodetsky, from the city of Ruzhany in Poland, who drowned aboard the Struma refugee ship in February 1942. In memory of the grandfather and grandmother of my late father-in-law Shaul Afek, Yaakov Meir Pinchuk and his wife Batya-Leah, from the town of Kobryn, then in Poland and now in Belarus.

"In memory of Annette (Hannah) Goldberg, née Herzog, aged 21, from Paris. Annette, my father’s cousin, [who] was captured on the border between occupied France and Vichy France and jailed at the Drancy internment camp near Paris in August 1942. The next month, Annette was loaded onto a cattle car to Auschwitz, where she was killed. She threw out of the carriage a letter, scrawled in pencil, to her mother, Aunt Esther, hiding in Paris. Farmers found the letter and smuggled it to her mother. Annette ended her letter with the words: 'Do not despair, mother, do not become addicted to grief. I am full of courage and hope… There are thousands like me. Wait for me patiently, my darling mother.' Aunt Esther waited and waited for her, believing that she would return, until her dying day.

"May their memories be a blessing."