Of Freedom and Heroism--Israel's 64th Independence Day

Of Freedom and Heroism Thoughts on the Confluence of Passover, Yom Hashoah and Israel’s Independence Day 

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman 

April 20, 2012 The confluence of Passover and Yom Hashoah—Holocaust Memorial Day—is not coincidental. The planners of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising timed it that way, to coincide with Pesach. The day they stood up to Hitler’s army of executioners was set aside to be our annual day of remembrance. We don’t diminish the joy we feel during the holiday, as we remember our redemption from Egypt. But the following week, all Am Yisrael, the People of Israel, stops still for 24 hours. The entire day is devoted to little else beside observance of the most catastrophic event our people had suffered in 2000 or more years. Some sink into their own memories and sadness; others listen intently—as though nothing else mattered in the universe—to stories of other people. How did you survive? Who was with you? Where did you hide? Who of your friends or family were killed?

In Israel, Holocaust Memorial Day has a longer name. There it is called Yom Hashoah v’Hagvura—Holocaust and Heroism Day. Few survivors today see themselves as heroes, though a few definitely are, and some were recognized for their heroism in many ways. But the truth is that every moment that they chose to live, to survive and to remember was an act of heroism.

Yes, there were many who gave in to the silence, when they saw that all hope was gone. But for each one of those, there were ten or more who swore that they would live, no matter what. The horrible lie—among others—that was told about our people during the Holocaust is that we let ourselves be led like sheep to the slaughterer.

It wasn’t so.

There was heroism when people chose to hope rather than despair. When they gathered at night, their strength all but gone, and quietly, among themselves, discussed the day’s events. Who survived? Who was shot? What news from the Russian front? Any newcomers from the west?

 There was heroism when people chose to live rather than throw themselves against the electrified barbed wires that surrounded them. There was heroism when they questioned God’s existence and chose to believe nonetheless. Or when they chose not to believe, but rather to depend, from now on, only on themselves and on their own strength and abilities.

There was heroism when they chose love over the hate that they saw and felt all around them. No greater acts of devotion and love could ever be found than in the five year old feeding her younger brother spoonful after spoonful from a tin container of tepid soup.

Of course there was heroism when a handful of Jews in this ghetto or that, chose to defend themselves. Somehow, they managed to smuggle a pickaxe or two, a few rusty guns, a couple of ancient rifles, enough gasoline to fuel a dozen or so Molotov cocktails, and with that they hoped to ward off the entire Nazi Army. In Warsaw they succeeded for a month. Resistance to deportations from ghettos to the concentration camps took place in many cities throughout Europe. Uprisings, besides Warsaw, included Sobibor, Kovno and Treblinka.

The Bielsky Brothers, whose story was told in the movie “Defiance,” saved 1,200 Jewish refugees. Many saved others by sharing a slice of bread or anything extra they might have had on them.

Later, as the war came close to its close, the British allowed a few hundred Jews to join His Majesty’s Army—forming the famed Jewish Brigade—and actually armed them, enlisting them—the first Jewish soldiers since the Maccabees—to fight the Germans in Italy.

 Another example of heroism was in the victory of morality over instinct. Though most of the Jews who found weapons chose to fight as underground partisans, some chose not to fight, but rather to take revenge, both on Nazis and their collaborators. For a moment, they set aside God’s commandment (Deut. 32:35) “Vengeance is mine.” However, in almost all such cases, their actions were acts of desperation, carried out after much heated discussion. And in almost all cases, in later years, those who carried out vengeance regretted their deeds. Despite it all, despite the many deaths they saw and felt around themselves, despite the momentary lapse, the sense of morality was left intact within them.

Nor did the heroism stop at the end of the war. Many survivors, after losing entire families, married again and had children again. The strength of life within them was never quashed. Like a smoldering ember, as soon as they could, they breathed new life, lit new fires that still glow today with warmth, scholarship, culture, devotion, love and selfless generosity.

And to top it all off, within three years of the end of the Holocaust, a ragtag throng of poorly armed refugees somehow managed to garner enough international political, social and economic support to create the State of Israel. To wrest control of our own fate, to take the reins of history into our own hands, to defy religious and social oppression and redefine our existence in our own ancient land—to overturn the harsh decree imposed upon us by the Romans and all the nations since the year zero—is quite possibly the greatest act of collective heroism the world has ever seen.

So never let it be said that the Jews let themselves be led to the slaughter like sheep. With each step we took, with each breath we insisted on gulping, with every fiber of our being, we fought back. Sometimes, as with the first Passover, it takes the outstretched arm of God to redeem us. At other times, as in our own day, survival depends on our own deeds of heroism and redemption. It’s how we’ve come to be here today.

May our lives reflect, with gratitude, the acts of heroism that brought us to this day, and may their shining example continue to inspire us and our children, and our children’s children, well into the future.

Kein y’hi ratzon, may this be God’s will.


 ©2012 by Boaz D. Heilman