MIAMI – Ahead of Israel’s 75th birthday, hundreds of South Florida residents had already started to celebrate on Friday in Jerusalem, the historic city that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam consider holy.
Zander Futernick, the entrepreneur who founded Miami-based ZED Aerospace, was there to honor the haven born in 1948 out of the genocide of European Jews from 1941 to 1945.
“It’s where, if everything goes wrong in the world, where Jews are supposed to be safe,” Futernick, who lives in Coconut Grove, said about what the Jewish state represents.
Moshe Lion, the mayor of Jerusalem, accepted keys to the city of Miami and Miami-Dade County with representatives of The Greater Miami Jewish Federation during an evening ceremony.
Earlier in the day, Gilbert Squires, a prominent Brickell-based attorney, visited the ancient Western Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall and the Buraq Wall, in the Old City of Jerusalem.
Squires said he was looking forward to commemorating Independence Day, and in preparation for that, he traveled on a mission with other Miami-Dade residents.
“There is all the people and all that, but I just wanted to kind of settle into the feeling of Shabbat and to just enjoy the delicious energy that we have here,” Squires said.
On a more somber note, Israel marked the beginning of Holocaust Remembrance Day, also known as Yom HaShoah, on April 17, after more than three months of protests against Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to overhaul the judiciary.
Israeli President Isaac “Bougie” Herzog delivered a speech at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial in Jerusalem to the victims of the Holocaust when Nazi Germany and an international network of collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews.
“Let us leave these sacred days, which begin tonight and end on Independence Day, above all dispute,” Herzog said. “Let us all come together, as always, in partnership, in grief, in remembrance.”
The commemorations also come with heightened security amid escalating Israeli-Palestinian violence involving Hamas militants in the occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran.
There was also violence earlier this month in Jerusalem after a police raid at the Al-Aqsa, a mosque built in A.D. 705 with a silver-dome structure dating back to A.D. 1035, on a hill that in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is venerated as a holy site.
Local 10 News Photojournalist Jason Weitzman contributed to this report from Jerusalem. Torres contributed to this report from Miami.