Reflections on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2018

Yom Ha-Shoah v'Ha-Gevurah

Reflections on Holocaust Remembrance Day

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

April 10, 2018

The Day of Commemoration of the Holocaust and Heroism (the full name of this day) is one of the most important days in the Jewish calendar. Like similar events—the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70 CE and the expulsion from Spain in 1492—the Holocaust represents a turning point in our history and lives.

The date that was chosen for this commemoration was set to recall the heroic uprising at the Warsaw Ghetto: 14 Nissan, 1943. The day before Passover.

So as not to cause conflict between the joy of liberation that we celebrate annually at Passover and the intense pain of recalling the Holocaust, the commemoration was moved to the week following the holiday.  This year, Yom Ha-Shoah V'ha-Gevurah will commence on Wednesday evening and conclude on Thursday evening.

Some of us reading this today were alive during these terrible living-nightmare years.  Some of us grew up in survivor homes and still bear living scars of the trauma our parents or grandparents suffered.  

All of us, Jews and non-Jews, were forever changed by the experience.

The brutality and cruelty of the Holocaust were worse than any other experience our people has ever lived through because of the technological know-how and efficiency brought to it by the Germans. And though there were some, including those whom the State of Israel has recognized as Righteous Gentiles, who helped Jews survive, by and large the majority of the world either supported the Germans or simply remained silent.

The debate over what could have been done and what should have been done continues to this day.

And though we still hear stories of survivors, these are getting fewer and fewer as the years pass.

We now have to rely on memory to keep alive both the events that transpired and the untold suffering that was borne by so many people.

There are, of course, the meticulous records that the Nazis somehow, inexplicably, kept.

The remains of concentration camps and crematoria still stand, bearing silent witness to the misery and suffering.

There are diaries that were kept and that somehow survived the great destruction, the most famous one of course being the one written by Anne Frank.  Many of these diaries, memoirs and Last Letters can be accessed through Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, Israel.

The scope of the destruction is too great to absorb: Six million Jews, among them a million and a half children. Each with his and her own story of survival, heroism and death.

Yes, the Nazis murdered others as well:  Gays, Roma (Gypsies), the mentally challenged, and many people of other nationalities. Yet what the Holocaust represents for the Jewish People is unique in the history of humankind, a culmination of more than two thousand years of persecution, an attempt to snuff out all Jewish lives and souls.

And now, as the actual events recede into the gray-zone of the past, remembering the vastness and profundity of the Holocaust has become OUR task.  Each and every one of us needs to learn at least one story and transmit it to the next generation. It is a moral, spiritual, and psychological imperative.

I urge you all to come to at least one of the events about to take place at the Winnipesaukee Playhouse this weekend. The play by Celeste Raspanti, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, based on poems written by children interned at the Terezin Concentration Camp before being shipped to the death camps at Auschwitz/Birkenau, will receive a professional staged reading on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon. Following the reading the audience will be invited to participate in a discussion with the actors.  I will participate in these discussions.   

For those of you who cannot be there, check out or purchase the book in your local library or bookstore. These poems and illustrations are living testaments, the last will of children who were never allowed to grow old.

But whether you are able to attend one or both of these readings or not, please take some time this week to reflect on the Holocaust: its relevance today, its lessons for eternity.  On Wednesday evening you might want to light a yahrzeit memorial candle in memory of someone you might know or in the collective memory of the six million. 

"Never Again!" is one of the lessons that some of us have taken from the Shoah into our lives.  As we see anti-Semitism on the rise again, as we watch genocide happening again--in Syria, Africa and various other places around the world--are these words still meaningful today, or have they become just one of those phrases we take out of some dusty corner once a year and put back at the end of the day?

The best response we Jews can give today is to stand up and say, hineni, "here I am!"  This is the traditional Jewish response to the call of God and history. We are here despite the many who have tried to destroy us.  In every generation, the Passover Haggadah tells us, a tyrant has risen to destroy us.  But we are here! Stronger than ever, stubborn as ever, steadfast as ever, we Jews are indestructible. 

For us Jews, memory is a commandment. We must always remember who we are and how we became that. We must always keep before us the vision of our purpose, the reason for our existence, no matter how difficult or challenging that might be.

Hineni.  Be there for those who did not survive.  Be there for those who are still carrying the pain.  Be there for the future.

Do not let the memory recede into nothingness.

© 2018 by Boaz D. Heilman