Last week we commemorated YOM HASHOAH – The Holocaust Remembrance Day.
What is the appropriate date for Holocaust Day? In 1959, after the establishment of the state, various options were proposed.
The 9th of Av: A date that gathered various catastrophic events over the generations.
Pro: This date integrates within Jewish history of tragedic milestones.
Con: The Holocaust wasn’t just another step in the sequence of the destruction of the temples, pogroms and persecutions we experienced throughout the history.
10 of Tevet: Alongside the 9 of Av as a traditional date, 10 of Tevet, is one of the days of
mourning for the destruction of the First Temple. The 10 of Tevet was determined by the Chief Rabbinate in Israel, even before the state determination of the Holocaust Day, as the ‘General Kaddish Day’. This is the time when “Kaddish” must be said in memory of the victims of the Holocaust whose date of death is unknown.
The 27th of Nisan: A date proposed by the founders of the Ghetto’s Fighters’s Kibbutznikim, including the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The date was chosen due to its proximity to the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising (on the eve of Passover 1943) but is intentionally placed between Passover and Independence Day.
The UN chose the date January 27, as the International Holocaust Remembrance
The Israeli government’s choice to emphasize the dimension of heroism and rebellion expresses more than anything the deep anxieties of the Israelis and the lack of understanding and empathy for the survivors in the years after the Holocaust. Until the Eichmann trial. Identifying the memory with a small group that dared and succeeded in obtaining weapons and attacking the Germans, was perhaps the only option for the Israeli leadership at the time to address the huge catastrophe of the Nazi extermination and no less than that, the terrible cooperation of most of the countries of the world with it. The survivors who came to Israel in those years were received with very mixed feelings. On the one hand, the “Sabars” – The classic Israelis proud of being born in Israel were happy at the survivor’s arrival and wanted to help them. On the other hand, the survivors were a living reminder that the new Israeli will never again go as a sheep to the slaughter.
Until the 7th of October arrived.
2500 Holocaust survivors experienced the difficult events of the October Seventh, which many compare to the events of World War II and other pogroms in the history of the Jewish people. About 2,000 Holocaust survivors were forced to abandon their homes and evacuate to a safe area as a result of the war, others chose to stay in their homes.
The events of October 7th flooded many Holocaust survivors with old memories. The necessity to leave the house quickly and move to another place for an unknown time.
Ruth Haran, a Holocaust survivor from Kibbutz Bari whose family members were abducted to Gaza, says: “The Holocaust was terrible, and even more terrible was that we had nowhere to go, there was no state, today we have a state. When we immigrated to Israel, my mother said we were going to Israel to build and be built. On the seventh of October, I felt torn, the whole kibbutz was burned, it was really a pogrom.” The clear statement emerging from the words of the survivors “never again” that they promised us, happened on October 7, and the world was silent, and continues to be silent even now. That is why I mentioned last Sunday, we can’t risk ourselves waiting for the good people with good intentions that may reappear in the future!
AM ISRAEL HAY!
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Refael Cohen