January 2010

Rabbi Judy Chessin

While we in the United States are accustomed to memorializing the Holocaust in the spring, between Passover and Israeli Independence Day, many of our European neighbors observe the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27.

In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated Jan. 27 as an annual international day of commemoration to remember the victims of the Nazi genocide.

This date was chosen since it is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. Yet, the date and its observances are not without controversies.

Controversy over commemorating the Holocaust is nothing new. We need only consider how difficult it was for the Israeli government to establish Yom HaShoah (27 Nisan) to understand the emotion behind choosing a specific commemorative date.

Upon the birth of the state of Israel in 1948, Israeli Jews felt an immediate need to establish an annual commemoration for the Shoah (the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people).

Orthodox Jews suggested the 10th of Tevet (this year, Dec. 27), a little known Jewish fast day marking the onset of the siege of Jerusalem which led to the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the subsequent Babylonian Exile (6th Century, B.C.E.). Survivors. however, objected to the notion of simply adding the tragedy of the Holocaust to an already existent day of mourning.

Surviving ghetto-fighters, partisans and members of the underground resistance felt the only date for a Holocaust memorial had to be April 19, the first day of the Warsaw ghetto revolt, the uprising that held the Nazis at bay until May 16, 1943.

However, Zionists objected to a solar/secular calendar date. Unfortunately, the Hebrew lunar date of the uprising, the 15th of Nisan, was Pesach and hence absolutely forbidden for this purpose by the Orthodox establishment.

Incidentally, the Nazis chose this date both to catch the Jews off guard on their holy day, as well as to give Adolf Hitler an April 20th birthday gift: the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Surely the joy of Passover, a festival of food, family, and faith, must not be marred by mourning and eulogies, contended Israel’s Orthodox.

While the Orthodox didn’t want the commemoration to fall in the month of Nisan at all, secular Zionists insisted the day be held well before Israeli Independence Day (5 Iyar).

A compromise was struck and on April 12, 1951 the Knesset declared 27 Nisan as Yom HaShoah U’Mered HaGetaot (Holocaust and Ghetto Revolt Remembrance Day), later changed to Yom HaShoah Ve-Hagevurah (Holocaust and Heroism Day).

With all this debate, one might imagine that the U.N.’s Holocaust Memorial Day, Jan. 27, would be less controversial. Not so.

For one, the Muslim Council of Britain has consistently boycotted the Holocaust Memorial Day. In 2001, the organization argued that the day “excludes and ignores the ongoing genocide and violation of Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere.” Second, they claim, it “includes the controversial question of (the alleged) Armenian genocide as well as the so-called ‘gay’ genocide.”

And while the MCB voted this year to lift its boycott, giving many the hope that the group was moderating its positions, MCB chose nonetheless to boycott last January’s Holocaust Memorial Commemoration due to Israel’s Operation Cast Lead — the Jewish State’s 2008 Chanukah incursion into Gaza to root out Hamas’ ongoing three-year missile attacks.

The MCB’s lack of distinction between Jews and the state of Israel is considered troubling by many. Indeed, it is also a form of Holocaust revisionism to argue that the state of Israel’s self-defense somehow invalidates the memory of the Shoah.

Also ironic is that the date was originated by the very United Nations before which Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this fall, held up detailed minutes of the Nazi Wannsee Council (the blueprint of the Final Solution) and plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp.

He did so to invalidate denials of the Holocaust by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, welcomed by the selfsame United Nations audience.

No matter when or how we memorialize the Shoah, we must never permit controversies and smoke screens to allow the world to forget or deny either this tragedy or our people’s right to survive.

In actuality, the Jewish response must instead be a year-round mission for our religious and secular, affiliated and unaffiliated, Zionist and non-Zionist: to get married, create more Jewish children, study and keep alive Torah in our world, and remember never to forget — whether this be during winter, spring, summer or fall.