Israeli leaders marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day Jan. 27 with a series of events, several of them outside the country.

Knesset Speaker Mickey Levy addressed the Bundestag in Berlin, urging German lawmakers and the international community to protect democracy and educate the younger generations against hatred. It was the first time that the Knesset speaker addressed the full German parliament. Newly-elected German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Holocaust survivor Inge Auerbacher also attended the address.

Speaking in Hebrew, and with great emotions, Levy noted that “here, in this historic building, the house of the German parliament, one can grasp — if only slightly — the ability of human beings to take advantage of democracy to defeat it. It is a place where humanity stretched the boundaries of evil — a place where the loss of values turned a democratic framework into racist and discriminatory tyranny.” At the end of his speech, with his voice choked by tears, Levy recited the Jewish traditional mourning prayer Kaddish, reading it out of a prayer book that belonged to a Jewish boy celebrating his bar mitzvah on Oct. 22, 1938, shortly before the Kristallnacht pogrom.

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid traveled this morning to Austria, where he visited the Mauthausen concentration camp where his grandfather died in April 1945. Addressing Austrian leadership, including Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, Lapid recounted, “My grandfather was sent to Auschwitz, and after that, he was sent here, to Mauthausen. When he arrived here, he was no longer a dad, he was no longer fat, he was no longer a person. He was a number. The Nazis went to great lengths to number their prisoners. My grandfather, like everyone who came to Auschwitz, had a number tattooed on his arm.’’ Lapid ended his speech saying, “Grenpa Bela, a quiet man whose family nickname was “Bela the Wise”, sent me here today to say on his behalf, that the Jews have not surrendered. They’ve established a strong, free, and proud Jewish state, and they sent his grandson, to represent them here today.”