President Rivlin spoke at the ceremony, followed by Dr. Anat Livne, Director, the Ghetto Fighters' Museum, and Nir Meir, the national chairman of the Kibbutz Movement. In addition, six torches were lit in memory of the six million murdered during the Holocaust.
Simultaneously, a ceremony was being held at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai at the monument in memory of Mordechai Anielewicz, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, MK Yair Lapid and Eshkol Regional Council head Gadi Yarkoni will speak at the ceremony, which will also be attended by representatives from 17 foreign states.
Earlier today some 10,000 participants from 40 different countries, many of them teens and youths, made the three-kilometers-long journey from the Auschwitz extermination to Birkenau as part of the 28th annual March of the Living.
The march, which began at 1:30pm local time (2:30pm Israel time), reached the gas chambers in Birkenau at around 3:30pm local (4:30pm Israel time), where all of the different delegations will come together to hold a memorial ceremony.
At 11am, the ceremony "Unto Every Person There is a Name" was held both in Yad Vashem's Hall of Remembrance and at the Chagall State Hall at the Knesset under the auspices of the Knesset's Speaker. During the ceremony, names of the Holocaust's victims will be read out. Also in attendance was President Rivlin and his wife, Prime Minister Netanyahu, Supreme Court President Naor, Opposition leader Isaac Herzog, and others.