This year marks the 65th anniversary of Yom Hashoah, the commemoration of the victims and heroes of the Holocaust.

Services and ceremonies took place this week in Cranston, across Rhode Island and around the world with the message of  “Never Again” during the April 12-13 remembrance.

Yom Hashoah is honored a week after the seventh day of Passover. The date was originally set by the Israeli government in 1951 and many Jewish communities and individuals worldwide reflect on the Holocaust on this day. Nearly six million Jews were killed in concentration camps.

At Temple Sinai in Cranston will hold a special Shabbat service this Friday night at 7:30 p.m. It will include a presentation by the seventh grade class. The students will be reading poems from the children of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The service will also include music to memorialize the victims of the Shoah and to honor the heroes.

“What can we do to keep the memory of the Shoah alive?’” said Rabbi Jeffrey Goldwasser of Temple Sinai. “It’s simple: take action against the genocides that are happening in the world today. ‘Never again’ means never again for anyone. There is genocide today in Myanmar against the Rohingya people. The Yazidis are threatened with genocide in northern Iraq. Syria is experiencing genocide in a complex conflict in which innocent people are caught between warring factions.”

In Israel, a law was passed that closes places of public entertainment. Israeli television airs Holocaust documentaries and Holocaust-related talk shows, and flags on public buildings are flown at half-mast. At 10 a.m., an air raid siren sounds throughout the entire country and Israelis observe two minutes of solemn reflection. Almost everyone stops what he or she are doing, including motorists who stop their cars in the middle of the road, standing beside their vehicles in silence as the siren is sounded.

One of the most common ways to mark the day is the lighting of a special candle. The Yellow Candle was created in 1981 to keep alive the memory of the six million who perished in the Shoah.

The candles mark the yahrzeit (anniversary of death) of the victims. It is a special memorial candle with yellow wax, in remembrance of the yellow stars forced upon European Jews in the 1930s.

In order to make history more relevant and relatable to young people there is a program called March of the Living, where teens travel to Poland and Israel and visit concentration camps and hear real-life stories from Holocaust survivors. “As the victims of the worst genocide in human history, Jews have a special obligation to make sure that such horrors never repeat,” said Goldwasser. “But the obligation is equally upon all humanity. We humans are all one race. We cannot allow innocent human beings to be killed for no better reason than their religion, their ethnicity, or just for being in the wrong place.”