JPost Editorial: Holocaust Remembrance Day: Finding new ways to never forget
In recent years, several individuals and groups have developed unique means of ensuring that we do not forget those who have been lost.Ruthie Blum: Holocaust remembrance and inexcusable hyperbole
Memory in the Living Room (Zikaron Basalon) is a longstanding tradition in which individual Holocaust survivors address up to 50 people – some of whom have never met a Holocaust survivor – in private living rooms or community centers, telling their personal stories from the Holocaust.
The project has been around for several years, and while it continues to draw audiences across Israel and around the world, young people require other approaches.
Hasdei Naomi, an association that gives aid to Holocaust survivors, organized a hackathon that brought intelligence officer cadets and MKs together to develop special technologies that could help preserve Holocaust survivor Tovah Feder’s story. The cadets managed to turn Feder’s story into a WhatsApp conversation that is based on advanced artificial intelligence.
The goal, the organization said, was to develop an educational initiative that would “speak to the younger generation in its language.”
In another initiative, the Israel Police has, in recent years, begun adopting Holocaust survivors. Members of Jerusalem’s Border Police units sit down with survivors at least twice a month throughout the year, pushing toward ongoing communication and building connections.
The diplomatic corps has joined the effort as well. The German embassy in Tel Aviv, for instance, has launched a new photography exhibition titled “Humans of the Holocaust,” which takes a painful and artistic approach to Holocaust remembrance. It tells the extraordinary stories of 40 Holocaust survivors, as well as the second and third generations, engaging viewers with the human stories behind every photo and helping them imagine the millions of untold stories.
This Yom Hashoah, let us memorialize the past while creating frameworks to continue doing so in the future.
During his Holocaust Remembrance Day speech on Monday night at Yad Vashem, Israeli President Isaac Herzog admonished the public never to invoke the genocide of the Jews in any context other than the Shoah itself. This was a not-so-veiled reference to a practice that’s become frighteningly commonplace in the politically polarized country.
“The Nazi abomination is an unprecedented evil, unique by any measure,” he said. “We must remember, repeat and emphasize again and again: These, and only these, are Nazis. This, and only this, is the Holocaust. Even when we are in the midst of fierce disagreements on our destiny, calling, faith and values, we must be careful about and guard against making any comparison, any analogy, to the Holocaust and the Nazis.”
He went on to remind the citizens of Israel that the “Nazi monster” didn’t distinguish between one member of the tribe or another, regardless of their “views, beliefs or lifestyles.” Indeed, he stressed, such “nuances” were utterly meaningless to those who set out to annihilate every last Jew.
“For them,” he pointed out, “we were one people, scattered and separated among all the nations, with one sentence: death. And our victory over them, as well, which takes place every day, is a victory of one people.”
He concluded: “We are currently celebrating 75 years of Israeli independence—75 years of victory during which the Jewish and democratic State of Israel and its [proud] society are standing up and declaring to the Nazi monster and those who, even in this generation, are following in its path: ‘You cannot defeat us, because we are brothers and sisters; yes, siblings who know how to argue and dispute, but never hate one another, are never enemies.’ We are one people and we will remain one people, united not only by a painful history, but also by a shared destiny and a hopeful future.”
It was an appropriate message with just the right tone. As is the case with all such pleas, however, the people who most needed to hear and heed it either weren’t listening or didn’t think it applied to them. Indeed, within minutes, Herzog’s social-media feed was filled with nasty remarks from both sides of the spectrum.
PMW: Even the Nazi’s didn’t pay a reward for murdering Jews
Today, on Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israel, the Jewish people around the world, and others mark the murder of 6,000,000 Jews by the Nazis. And still today, in 2023, there is an organization that rewards the murder of Jews and literally pays hundreds of millions of dollars every year in cash rewards, to people who participated in terror and murdered Jews, simply for being Jews. It is not the Nazis this time, but the PA.
Much has already been written about the Palestinian Authority’s terror-rewarding Pay-for-Slay policy, first exposed by Palestinian Media Watch in 2011, and it is doubtful whether there is an honest government in the world that could deny knowledge of its existence.
Nonetheless, ignoring the unequivocal fact that the PA uses substantial parts of its budget to reward terrorists for murdering Jews, European governments, the European Union, and others have continued to provide funding to the PA. In fact, the recently published “European Joint Strategy in support of Palestine” noted, that “Since 2008 the EU, EU Member States, Norway and Switzerland have disbursed around USD 1 billion annually in official development assistance to Palestine and the Palestinians.”
The PA is not oblivious to this reality. Rather, the PA rightly interprets the continued aid provided by the international community to the PA as nothing short of an endorsement of its heinous terror-rewarding policy. It is this feeling of empowerment that allows PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas – whose most important, if not only, legacy for the Palestinian people is the Pay-for-Slay policy – to brazenly and repeatedly declare that even if the PA is left with just one penny in its coffers, he will pay it first to the terrorists:
We never lost our #Hope, and we never will. pic.twitter.com/zw9ZkcIlkG
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) April 17, 2023