As Much As We Might Want to

We must not forget.

Yom Hashoah [yome ha-show-ah], begins tonight as the sun sets, and is observed through sundown tomorrow. Translated directly Yom Hashoah means the day of the Holocaust, but it is the name given to Holocaust Remembrance Day. In Israel, much of the daily goings on halt, and memorial ceremonies are conducted throughout the country to honor survivors and children of survivors, as well as those who had their lives taken from them. For two minutes, sirens are sounded and everything just comes to a stop. It's a pretty amazing sight. You can see recordings on YouTube of traffic on the highway slowing to a complete stop. Some motorists even get out of their cars. The main ceremonies take place at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. Here six torches are lit to memorialize the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.


As a Jewish person, an American, a Human Being, it is important for me to remember and to ask others to remember as well. In many ways, and for many painful reasons, we would like to forget such tragedy. But we know to forget is to dishonor those who had their lives taken from them. We know to forget is to fail to acknowledge what happened. We know to forget opens the door for something like this to happen again. And make no mistake about it, around the world this kind of hatred and genocide is still taking place.

As the Holocaust gets further and further in the rear view mirror, so too are the survivors and witnesses aging. It's becoming more important to capture the testimonies of the survivors. Steven Spielberg founded the Shoah Foundation in 1994 to begin collecting audiovisual footage from survivors and witnesses. Spielberg believed in the importance of creating a recorded archive before we no longer had firsthand accounts of what happened. The USC Shoah Foundation: The Institute for Visual History and Education now has over 53,000 video testimonies recorded, mostly of the Holocaust: survivors, liberators, rescuers, aid providers, etc. But the archive now includes testimonies from other global incidences of genocide, such as the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide.

I know this is a deeply somber and painful topic. But I implore you to spend some time remembering. Whether you read a new piece of literature about the events, listen to or watch a survivor's account, or research some of the heroes who risked their own lives to help try and save others, it is important to remember. Remember the cruelty. Remember the hatred. Remember the evil. For what we do not remember we are doomed to repeat. We can't simply turn away or bury it because it's too painful to think about, or even too hard to believe. It is painful. It is real. It must never happen again.

Never forget.

You can access excellent informational videos and stories by Yad Vashem, on You Tube:  https://www.youtube.com/user/YadVashem