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Shoah (שׁוֹאָה) is the Hebrew word for "destruction" and is another name used to refer to the European Holocaust, when six million Jews - including one and a half million children - were systematically and ruthlessly murdered by the Nazis during World War II. |
Before it was established as a national holiday by the Knesset in 1953, there were many rabbis who objected to its establishment because Tishah B'Av already commemorated the multiple tragedies of the Jewish people. These rabbis reasoned that were it not for the exile caused by the destruction of the Second Temple (as recalled during Tishah B'Av), the European Holocaust itself would not have occurred, and therefore an additional holiday was superfluous. Nevertheless, the emotional pain of the Holocaust was so great that the objection of the rabbis was overruled by the people, and the only question left was when Yom HaShoah should be observed. Many people called for a Nisan 15 date, since that marked the time of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but since Nisan 15 marks the first day of Passover, it was rejected. After various other dates were suggested, Nisan 27 was finally adopted -- after Passover Week but still during the time of the Waraw uprising. Note that in the modern State of Israel, Yom HaShoah is usually called Yom Hazikaron la'Shoah ve'laGevurah (יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה), "Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day." |
The Meaning of the Shoah |
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Although volumes have been written about the meaning of the Holocaust, I see in it the ultimate triumph of the individual Jewish spirit over the oppression of the nation state and its inherent tendency to assimilate the individual as a slave to the collective. "The fundamental distinction in Hitler's thought was between those willing to surrender their lives, submit to the nation and community, and those not willing to do so. The Aryan or good Nazi represented an individual who was willing to sacrifice unconditionally, while Jews represented persons who were unwilling to sacrifice. Jews symbolized for Hitler the negation of Nazism and its ideology: lack of faith in Germany, the persistence of individuality, and refusal to bow down to the sacred community. The Final Solution was undertaken in order to demonstrate that Jews would not be exempt from the obligation to submit to the nation-state. They too-like the German soldier-would be obligated to sacrifice themselves-to die for the country." - Richard Koenigsberg, The Sacrificial Meaning of the Holocaust By the Sovereign Hand of God, after the horror of the Holocaust was fully disclosed to the world community at the end of World War II, in 1947 the United Nations voted in favor of the Zionist plan of securing an independent Jewish state in Palestine (today this would be impossible, given the rampant anti-Jewish sentiment consistently evidenced by the UN ever since this historic vote). Thus the horrors of the Holocaust eventually resulted in the great blessing of the regathering of the Jewish people back to their ancient homeland - and the establishment of the modern state of Israel. |
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Overlooked Victims of the Holocaust |
Elie Wiesel, a Jewish survivor of the Shoah, has said, "while not all victims were Jews, all Jews were victims," and it is imperative to remember that Jewish people were the primary targets of Nazi murder. However, it is also important to give remembrance to the sixteen to twenty million non-Jewish victims of Nazi hatred as well, including the following groups: |
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Table information assembled from figures quoted by Karen Silverstrim (Overlooked Millions: Non-Jewish Victims of the Holocaust). |
Edward Lucaire notes that the best-kept secret in the U.S. about the Holocaust is that Poland lost six million citizens or about one-fifth of its population: three million of the dead were Polish Christians, predominantly Catholic, and the other three million were Polish Jews. The second best-kept secret of the Holocaust is the greatest number of Gentile rescuers of Jews were Poles, despite the fact that only in Poland were people (and their loved ones) immediately executed if caught trying to save Jews (for more information, please see www.holocaustforgotten.com). |
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PostScript: A Warning about our Age |
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We see terrifying analogues of a fascist worldview in our postmodern world today. The traditional view that "truth" is a correspondence between reality and language has been largely abandoned. Today, as it was in Hitler's Germany, truth is cynically regarded as a "construct" of interpretation driven by the will to power. Literary deconstruction and fascism go hand in hand. Hegel's dialectic (i.e., the devil's syncretistic logic) is still at work in the halls of power to this very day, and therefore the message of Yom HaShoah is a message for all of us to resist tyranny and the political forces that seek to enslave us. As Soren Kierkegaard so ably demonstrated, the faith of the individual and the individual's relationship to God is the power that overcomes the forces of darkness in this world. |
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Additional Information about the Holocaust |
Yad Vashem |
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