The two-minute siren at 10 a.m. (0700 GMT) is an annual tradition marking Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day, which began Sunday evening and ends at sundown Monday. Pedestrians froze in their tracks, buses stopped on busy streets, and cars on major highways pulled over as the country paused to pay respect to the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis.

All day, television stations devoted their broadcasts to historical documentaries and movies, and radio stations played somber music and interviews with survivors. Schools held memorial services, places of entertainment were shut down and the Israeli flag was waved at half mast.

At Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial and museum, the nation’s leaders gathered along with Holocaust survivors for the annual wreath-laying ceremony at the Warsaw Ghetto Square. Later, ordinary Israelis flocked to the museum’s hall of remembrance to recite names of victims. Other ceremonies, prayers and music performances were planned.

Former Cabinet minister Joseph Lapid, a Holocaust survivor and chairman of the Yad Vashem council, lamented the world has not learned from the Nazi tragedy.

He pointed to the ongoing conflict in Darfur and warned that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — who has denied the Holocaust and called for Israel’s destruction — poses a new threat of genocide. Israel fears Iran’s nuclear program is aimed at developing atomic weapons.

“Ahmadinejad is planning to have means of destruction compared to which the gas chambers at Auschwitz were just the beginning,” he said at Sunday night’s opening ceremony at Yad Vashem.

At the same ceremony, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert noted that Israel celebrates its 59th independence day next week.

“The renewal of the Jewish people, its shaking off the ashes of the Holocaust for a new life and national rebirth in its historic birthplace, is the pinnacle of its victory,” he said.

But the plight of the Holocaust survivors in Israel has been difficult. Many arrived directly from Europe to fight in the Jewish state’s war of independence in 1948, and have since struggled to cope with the physical and emotional burdens of World War II.

Recent data reveals that about a third of the remaining Holocaust survivors in Israel live under the poverty line, drawing widespread outrage.

“We must never accept a reality in which even one of the Holocaust survivors in Israel is living without dignity,” Acting President Dalia Itzik said in a speech Sunday.

The government announced it was establishing a commission to solve the matter, but hundreds gathered in front of parliament Monday to protest what they called the state’s neglect of survivors.

With the passing years fewer and fewer survivors remain. There are some 250,000 survivors in Israel, about half of the worldwide total. Nearly 10 percent of the aging population dies each year.

In Israel, 2,000 die each month, a rate of 65 daily, according to experts cited in Israeli newspapers Monday.

With each passing day, the world loses its last live voices who can directly attest to the horrors of the Holocaust and confront a growing tide of worldwide Holocaust denial.

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