יום הזיכרון – יום העצמאות – Memorial Day – Independence Day
Today is Memorial Day here in Israel. They had a siren sound last night at 8PM, just like on Yom Hashoa, and a ceremony at the Western Wall. This year the ceremony was held without any audience and was just broadcast on the news and social media. Locally, in downtown Ra’anana, they covered all of street signs on the main street with names of fallen soldiers. The whole town is decorated in flags, and everybody has flags on their walls and balconies.
Street sign with the names of two soldiers who died
Ra’anana city hall
Flag of Israel, Flag of Ra’anana
Flags decorating our apartment
Decorating our balcony
Meanwhile, life goes on. The government was again afraid that people would go out and celebrate on Independence day, therefore there is another complete lockdown starting tonight until tomorrow – you can’t even go out for food. We went shopping at the supermarket in the Ra’anana mall.
The grocery store is open, but if you look the other way…
…the rest of mall is empty.
This morning at 11:00AM the siren sounded again. Here is a video I took during that time.
And this is a 1 minute summary of the Memorial Day Ceremony held yesterday evening at the Western Wall. You can catch a glimpse of the flag being lowered to half mast. Tonight, when Independence Day begins, the flag will be raised once again to its full height.
And below is the singing of Hatikvah at the very end of the ceremony, broadcast by one of the local news channels:
We plan to have a bar-b-q as i suppose is the custom 😀 tonight. Tomorrow the kids are off school, but like everyone we’ll be forced to celebrate independence day at home.