Controversy and hope marked this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day across Europe, observed for the first time in several countries.

It had an inauspicious inauguration in Estonia, where its low-key observance overshadowed by the blocking of a Simon Wiesenthal Centre advertisement campaign offering cash rewards to catch war criminals

The Baltic state decided last year to institute January 27 as the day on which to commemorate the Shoah. But the row over the advertisement led to suggestions by the Wiesenthal Centre that the former Soviet republic was motivated more by a desire to ease its entry into NATO than to examine its role in genocide. Of the 1,000 Jews who remained in Estonia during the war, seven survived.

Dr Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Israel, said: “I think it’s outrageous that the ads won’t be run. If the police had a Nazi walk in the door and say he was a Nazi, they still wouldn’t find him.

They’re more interested in protecting Estonians’ reputation than in finding war criminals,” he declared.

Estonia’s Security Police Board criticised the advertisement for the centre’s Operation Last Chance, which offers $10,000 to anyone providing information leading to the conviction of Nazi war criminals. Similar campaigns have been launched in the other former Soviet Baltic republics, Lithuania and Latvia.

In a letter to the Estonian advertising agency Media House, which later turned down the Wiesenthal campaign, the security board wrote: “We are of the opinion that the included allegation — ‘During the Holocaust, Estonians murdered Jews in Estonia and in other countries’ — is de jure incorrect.”

Saying it did not have information about Estonians’ having being convicted for murdering Jews in other countries, nor evidence to suspect citizens of such crimes, the letter said the “allegation invades the constitutional rights and liberties of all Estonians.”

The local Jewish community also opposed the ad campaign, amid concerns it might cause anti-Jewish backlash in Estonia. Its chairman, Cilja Laud, told the JC: “If it were printed it would create a big tsores. We have no security… If people started to bomb the community, who would be responsible? Efraim Zuroff?”

Dr Zuroff said that an historical commission set up by Estonia’s president in 1998 had shown that the country’s police were involved in the killing of Jews both in wartime Estonia and Belarus.

Commenting on Ms Laud’s concerns, he added: “My contention is that in the long run, the best defence for the Jewish community is to expose murderers and show why the Holocaust was such a terrible event.”

Among memorial ceremonies across Europe was one at the former Nazi camp of Auschwitz. Survivors placed flowers, lit candles and said prayers on the 58th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. Israel’s envoy to Poland, Shevach Weiss, himself a survivor, said the crimes of the Holocaust could never be forgiven.

France’s first Holocaust Memorial Day had a low profile, its observance confined mainly to individual school functions.

But in Germany, the day marked the start of a new stage in post-war Jewish life with the formal signing of a funding agreement between the federal government and the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

The arrangement was in line with existing funding accords with the main Christian churches and will almost triple the Central Council’s annual budget, to about £2 million. It will also help in the integration into German society of the thousands of Jewish immigrants who have been arriving from the former USSR.

“This is a truly historic day for Jews in Germany,” Paul Spiegel, the head of the Central Council, said at the signing ceremony. “No one would have believed in 1945 that there could ever be Jewish life in Germany again.”

Hundreds of commemorative events were staged in Italy and the day’s theme dominated the media. In Rome, dozens of schools took part, while some 20,000 people participated in a memorial march in Milan.

Italian President Silvio Berlusconi also awarded the national Order of Merit to seven people who had either survived the Holocaust or helped to save Jews.