In Israel, at any given moment, horns beep at intersections the moment the yellow flashing light joins the red light, the signal that a green light is coming. Drivers insist on moving forward, push the cars in front of them by creeping up before the green. Cars push through intersections on the other end, too, entering as the light turns red, a perpetual near-gridlock that somehow keeps flowing, however slowly, anyway.

Today, however, at 10 am everything stopped. I sat on a bus in Tel Aviv on my way to work, at busy intersection. A man got out of his truck and stood next to it. Other drivers and passengers got out of their cars and stood. Then I heard the siren.

The bus driver stood. All of us inside the bus stood. Pedestrians stood still.

A nation commemorated the Holocaust, the Shoah. For a brief moment, a siren's mournful wail, and a silent, standing people stretched time into the past. Everything was still.

Some of us on the bus remembered that during our generation, six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Some of us remembered that during our parents' generation or our grand-parents' generation the Shoah was. Some likely remembered lost family members, or at least the names and echoing memories of those lost in their family.

The siren sound fell. Everyone on the bus sat back down, the pedestrians strode along their ways again, and as soon as the flashing yellow light joined the red light in front of us, a couple of horns sounded their drivers' impatience.

Perhaps it is fitting. For even after our moment of rememberance, genocide continues in our own time. Distant places names like East Timor, Rwanda, and most recently, Sudan echo like impatient horns. Time for us to get a move on. Time to go. Somewhere. Anywhere.