JERUSALEM — A long line of international dignitaries have paid visits to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and President Biden’s visit on Wednesday was not his first.
As vice president in 2010, he toured the site’s Holocaust History Museum, Hall of Names, Children’s Memorial and Hall of Remembrance, where he participated in a memorial ceremony, and where an eternal flame burns by a crypt containing the ashes of Holocaust victims, commemorating the six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II.
Back then, Mr. Biden spoke movingly of how, as a young father, he had taken each of his sons at age 15 to Dachau, the Nazis’ first concentration camp. Established in Germany in 1933, it was liberated 12 years later by the United States military. Mr. Biden said he had wanted his sons to understand the “ability of mankind to be so brutal.”
This time, the presidential visit to Yad Vashem may provide a resonant reaffirmation of the human spirit and capacity for survival: Mr. Biden and his delegation are scheduled to meet two Holocaust survivors, Rena Quint and Giselle Cycowicz, who survived various concentration camps and, after the war, immigrated to the United States.
Ms. Quint, who was a young child during the Holocaust, and Ms. Cycowicz, who was a young teenager, are part of a fading generation that can bear witness to the Nazi atrocities.
After arriving there on Wednesday, Mr. Biden donned a black kippa and met Yad Vashem’s chairman, Dani Dayan, a former settler leader who was Israel’s consul general in New York.
At a memorial ceremony, he rekindled the eternal flame. A children’s choir performed “Walk to Caesarea,” a 1942 poem by Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian Jewish resistance fighter in World War II. It was set to music in 1945, the year after Ms. Szenes was caught behind enemy lines and executed.
A cantor also recited a Jewish prayer for the souls of the Nazis’ victims.
Accompanying him on the visit were Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog; Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who is the son of a Holocaust survivor; Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, a former chief rabbi of Israel who is chairman of Yad Vashem’s council and himself a survivor; Israel’s defense minister, Benny Gantz; Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken; and Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser.
