Dateline Jerusalem –– This week is Holocaust Memorial Day, known as Yom HaShoah (Day of The Catastrophe) in Israel. It also is referred to as Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day. The entire country observes this solemn occasion. Six Holocaust survivors are chosen each year to carry a brass flame-lit torch to light memorial fires at a ceremony held by the government. Each one represents one million of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. One-third of the Jews in the world were annihilated during the Holocaust. The chief rabbi of Israel recites the Mourners’ Kaddish prayer. The evening ends with the singing of “Hatikvah,” “The Hope.” It is Israel’s national anthem.
The following morning the country literally comes to a standstill. A loud air raid siren is sounded, bringing cars, buses, trains and pedestrians to a halt. People exit their vehicles with heads bowed in silent devotion and prayer. They stand at attention for two minutes to give respect to those who lost their lives in the Holocaust for the crime of being a Jew. At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, there is a wreath-laying ceremony. Names of Holocaust victims are read aloud there as well as in the Knesset, Israel’s legislature.
The sayings “Never again!” and “We must never forget” are familiar yet eerie because the atmosphere throughout the world is similar to that of 1930s pre-Nazi Europe. The majority of those who survived the death and labor camps, the forced marches, the mass shootings, the gas chambers and ovens, the cruel medical experiments, and a myriad of other atrocities, made their way to Israel. Only 185,000 Holocaust survivors are alive today in Israel, mostly in their 80s and 90s. Will the world still remember the horror once these survivors pass on? Even today when the survivors are still around, the world seems to have forgotten the genocide of European Jewry during World War II. Holocaust studies are outlawed in some Western countries and most Arab countries. It is considered offensive to Muslims who teach their children that it never happened. There are laws against ritual kosher slaughter and circumcision in many European countries. Hate crimes against Jews have skyrocketed. Neo-Nazi factions are winning votes in some European countries. Almost one-third of European Jews are considering leaving.
Just as the story of the Exodus from Egypt has been passed down from generation to generation at our Passover seders every year, so, too, do these survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust pass on to their children and to the world what happened. Unlike the rest of the world that observed International Holocaust Day in January, Israel observes it on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, according to the Hebrew calendar. While most of European Jewry were like sheep going to slaughter, a few Jews in Warsaw resisted. They fought their oppressors. The Israeli mentality is that it will not go to slaughter without putting up a fight.
While Iran is calling for the annihilation of Israel and arming Hezbollah and Hamas, the U.S. is entering into a dangerous nuclear weapons treaty with Iran. Although the U.S. claims it will help Israel should Iran attack, the absurdity of that commitment reminds me of what Golda Meir told the US president in her day, “By the time you honor your commitment, we’ll be dead.”
While the Simon Wiesenthal Center has praised Germany for their efforts in making it easier to prosecute former Nazis and anyone who served in a death camp or a mobile killing squad as an accessory to murder, the Center has chastised Washington. The charge: Failing to prosecute a commander of a Nazi SS-led unit accused of burning villages filled with women and children, and then lying to American immigration officials after World War II to enter the country. This is the first time the U.S. has gone from an “A” ranking in Nazi-hunting efforts to a “B”.
May there never be another Holocaust. May the people in Israel live peacefully, safely. May those of you in the Diaspora have a home in Israel should G-d forbid you need a place to go.
L’hitraot. Shachar