Candle Lighting Ceremony

Each year at the State Official Holocaust Days of Remembrance observance ceremony, six candles are lit in memory of the six million victims of the Holocaust. 

Archive of candle lighters.

We Light Our Candles

We light our candles by passing the light of memory and hope from one to another. Let us honor those whose lights were put out, whose dreams, hopes and lives were snuffed out before they even lived, for the one and one half million children.

We light a candle for the untold millions for whom there is no one to mourn, whose entire families were annihilated and who lie in unmarked graves.

We light a candle for those who stood upright while others were bending to unmoral will. For the Righteous Among the Nations who risked and even gave their lives to help their fellow human beings.

We light a candle for those brave soldiers who liberated the camps; who carried the dead and near dead in their arms to a kinder and more humane future and for those who served with the allied forces to put an end to tyranny and oppression.

We light a candle for the nearly six million Jews and for the six million non-Jews who perished in a planned system of human destruction, the scale of which had never before been even imagined.

We light a candle for those who live even now under the yoke of oppression, in places where the threat of genocide is real and ever present.

-Unknown