The day was marked by the burial in a Jerusalem cemetery of ashes and bones of thousands of Jews brought from the Flossenbürg concentration camp and religious ceremonies held in honor of the victims.

The following year, in December 1950, the Rabbinate, organizations of former European Jewish communities and the Israel Defense Forces held memorial ceremonies around the country; they mostly involved funerals, in which objects such as desecrated Torah scrolls and the bones and ashes of the dead brought from Europe were interred.

[4][5][6] On May 3, 1951, the first officially organized Holocaust Remembrance Day event was held at the Chamber of the Holocaust on Mount Zion; the Israel Postal Service issued a special commemorative envelope; and a bronze statue of Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, was unveiled at Yad Mordechai, a kibbutz named for him.

[3][2] Yom HaShoah opens in Israel at sundown[8] in a state ceremony held in Warsaw Ghetto Square at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes Authority, in Jerusalem.

It is customary to pause what is being done and to reflect, including motorists who stop their cars in the middle of the road, standing beside their vehicles in silence as the siren is sounded.

[14] Since 1988 in Poland, a memorial service has been held after a three-kilometer walk by thousands of participants from Auschwitz to Birkenau in what has become known as "The March of the Living".

[21] Some Haredi rabbis recommend adding piyyutim (religious poems) about the Holocaust to the liturgy of Tisha B’Av; some adherents follow this advice.

[22][23] In 1981, members of the Federation of Jewish Men's Clubs FJMC, a branch of the mainstream Conservative/Masorti movement, created a special memorial project specifically for Yom HaShoah.

A dedicated yahrzeit candle was conceived, with yellow wax and a barbed-wire Star of David logo reminiscent of the armbands Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust.

Ismar Schorsch, former Chancellor of Conservative Judaism's Jewish Theological Seminary of America held that Holocaust commemoration should take place on Tisha b'Av.

[citation needed] More recently Conservative rabbis and lay leaders in the US, Israel and Canada collaborated to write Megillat Hashoah (The Holocaust Scroll).

A responsum was written by Rabbi Golinkin expressing the view that not only is it legitimate for the modern Jewish community to write a new scroll of mourning, it was also incumbent to do so.

[30] More modern Haggadot for Yom HaShoah, such as Gathering from the Whirlwind,[31][32] have concentrated on renewal,[33] remembrance, and the continuity of Jewish life.