The State of Israel paused last night in memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon spoke at Yad Vashem:
"Jews will never again be without a home, without a safe refuge, without protection," Sharon said at the ceremony. "We will never again be caught unprepared. Never again."
The annual state ceremony was broadcast live on Israeli television channels and radio, and all places of entertainment in the country were closed. This morning, a two-minute siren will be sounded at 10 a.m. at the start of a series of day-long ceremonies throughout the nation.
At Yad Vashem and in the Knesset, the "Unto Every Person There is a Name" ceremony features the reading of Holocaust victims’ names.
Caroline Glick writes about the relationship of the Holocaust to Jewish identity:
[T]he Holocaust, in and of itself, tells us nothing about Jewish identity. It only tells us about the rest of the world. The Jews of Europe did not decide to die. . . The Holocaust was a German initiative, carried out by Germans and millions of collaborators from France to Greece to Poland to Lithuania. The decision to prevent the Jews’ escape from Europe to the Land of Israel belonged to Britain.
The group that really ought to be taking the Holocaust to heart is not the Jews, but the Europeans who two generations ago descended to the depths of human depravity by either conducting the extermination of European Jewry or enabling it.
Glick writes that Holocaust memorials in Europe are offered as a "sop to Holocaust-obsessed Jews, [and] they are used to teach Europeans that nationalism is bad."
Speaking in 2000, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said, "The core of the concept of Europe after 1945 was and still is a rejection of the European balance of power principle and the hegemonic ambitions of individual states."
But this has nothing to do with the causes for the liquidation of European Jewry. It was not Polish or American nationalism that led to the Holocaust. The balance of power between Britain and France had nothing to do with the Holocaust.
It was genocidal anti-Semitism, nurtured by 2000 years of Christian mythology, embraced by a post-Nietzschean Germany, and accepted relatively enthusiastically by the overwhelming majority of the rest of Europe that caused the Holocaust.
American Jews, living in a land of unprecedented freedom and prosperity, also have a special need for a meaningful ceremony, for reasons articulated by Rabbi David Wolpe:
Sixty years have passed since the end of the World War II and the liberation of the concentration camps. The survivors who remember the horrors are growing old. .
Yom HaShoah, the day in which we remember those who died in the Holocaust, should press hard on the unimaginable suffering, the innocence, the waste, the destruction. . . .
Those who are fortunate to live in comfort need the wisdom of those who have seen the underworld.
And memory, which is ever eager to push away the pain, threatens to elide this mind-numbing event, to turn it into a black hole of history.
American Jews are part of a culture in which it is forgetfulness, not memory, that is the danger. What pallid holidays are Veterans Day, Memorial Day, in our culture. In most communities, those who have fallen in defense of America are remembered with a picnic or a department store sale.
For the Jewish people, this day is one to remember six million individuals, each a world, and to be thankful that survivors are still with us, and that they lived lives summarized by Zvi Gill in a statement published by Yad Vashem:
We, the last vestiges of European Jewry emerged from the camps, the forests, and the death marches. We were ragged, bitter and orphaned, without friend or relative, without a home.
We were secretly wondering in our hearts if after the ghettos, transports, and Auschwitz would we still be capable of rekindling a spark of life within us? Could we ever work again? Love again? Would we dare begin a family again?
No, we didn’t turn into wild animals, hungering only for vengeance. This is a testament to the principles we possess as a people imbued of enduring faith in both man and Providence. We chose life.
We chose to rebuild our lives, to fight for the establishment of the State of Israel, and we chose to contribute to society in Israel and in a host of other countries.
The entire statement is worth reading, as are the other links above. And since this day should also be a remembrance of what those who are gone would advise about the present, it would be extremely worthwhile to re-read Cynthia Ozick’s stunning essay: The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!