This is repeated the next day, in the morning. Most employers offer it as an optional day off work.

In military cemeteries throughout the country, special services are held in honor of the fallen soldiers. Generally, memorial torches are lit, speeches said, and then the families and friends are left alone with their dead. The graveyards are filled with weeping parents, friends, spouses. Adults try to describe to children the special brother, father, uncle, they have never known. People who have been fortunate enough not to have lost relatives in Israel's wars visit graveyards simply in order to remember those who gave their lives so that the State of Israel could live. Indeed, in many respects, they consider the fallen to be a part of their own family. As they read the tombstones of those who fell in battle, they pay tribute to each soldier as a hero, each with a story of his or her own. Baruch Shapiro was one such hero, an 18 year old survivor of the Shoah, who fell in the War of Independence defending Jerusalem in 1948. Read his story.

So many names, so many young lives cut short: the memories are cherished across the years, but are especially vivid on this day, when the nation marks the tremendous human sacrifice for the sake of the Jewish State. By mid-afternoon on Yom HaZikaron, most of the visitors have gone home, to continue their mourning in private.

As we stand at the brink of the celebration of fifty-four years since the establishment of the State of Israel, Yom Hazikaron reminds us of the high human cost of the wars Israel has fought for its very survival, indeed for the very right to exist. Only with the darkness of human loss, came the light of victory, and the dawn of hope for the Jewish people. It is this transition from a day of sadness and reflection to one of triumph and hope that so characterizes the Jewish psyche, and that is so poignantly reflected in the change of mood as night falls. Out of the ashes of the memories of Yom Hazikaron come the buoyant celebrations of Israel's Independence Day, Israel's fifty-fourth...Join our celebrations!