News Service from House Harris

MID: Israel remembers Holocaust still seething over Iran

JERUSALEM, April 21 AFP - The wail of sirens brought Israel to a halt on Tuesday in solemn remembrance of six million Jews killed by the Nazis, with the nation seething over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's latest anti-Israel tirade.

During a two-minute silence across the Jewish state for Holocaust Remembrance Day, pedestrians stopped in their tracks, some with their heads bowed, and road traffic came to a halt.

The collective commemoration came a day after Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly described the Holocaust as a "myth", stirred a storm of criticism when he described Israel as "the most cruel and repressive racist regime".

His comments at a UN conference on racism in Switzerland triggered outrage in the West and prompted a walkout by many European countries at the opening of the Geneva conference -- held on the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birthday.

"Anti-Semitism is an ancient historic phenomenon," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem on Monday.

"If anyone thought that following the horrific events of the Holocaust this malignant phenomenon would vanish from this world, it is today obvious that he was wrong."

Israeli deputy prime minister Silvan Shalom also denounced Iran ahead of a Holocaust ceremony in Poland at the former death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

"What Iran is trying to do right now is not far away at all from what Hitler did to the Jewish people just 65 years ago," Shalom told reporters.

As the sirens wailed in Israel from 0700 GMT (1700 AEST), teenage schoolgirls, a youth in a sleeveless T-shirt and a man wearing the black suit and hat of religious Ashkenazi Jews froze in their tracks on a main Jerusalem street.

On the main highway through the commercial capital Tel Aviv, a line of cars, trucks and taxis snaked along the side of the road, the drivers beside their vehicles, many with heads bowed or standing to attention.

Netanyahu laid a wreath at the Warsaw Ghetto Square in Yad Vashem at a ceremony on Tuesday attended by President Shimon Peres and other senior officials.

Israel began marking the annual Holocaust remembrance after sundown on Monday with a ceremony at Yad Vashem, where survivors of the Nazi genocide lit six candles in memory of the victims.

"The sad fact is that while we mark the Holocaust Memorial Day here at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, some chose to attend the show of hatred against Israel held as we speak in the heart of Europe," Netanyahu said.

"We will not let Holocaust deniers carry out another Holocaust of the Jewish people. This is the supreme commitment of the state of Israel."

The UN conference, which had already been hit by a boycott by several governments led by the United States and Israel, fell into disarray after Ahmadinejad launched his new outburst against the Jewish state.

Ahmadinejad, who has previously called for the Jewish state to be wiped off the map, said that as compensation for racism in Europe "the most cruel and racist regime" was created in the Middle East after World War II.

"Following World War II they resorted to military aggressions to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering," he said.

"And they sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine."

More than 230,000 Holocaust survivors currently live in Israel, according to estimates by advocacy groups.