Beginning Sunday, Yom Hashoah events scheduled throughout Denver will summon collective hearts to aching memory. Tears will fall as Holocaust survivors, their children and grandchildren share the nightmare, and the hope. Names will be read, candles lit, memorial prayers recited.
But for the majority of American Jews who have lived beyond the Holocausts tentacles, the act of remembering is unconnected to personal experience. We grew up in safety; our days filled with endless promise, free of constant fear. Of course we know about the Holocaust. But the Holocaust did not know us.
It is our sacred obligation as Jews to rescue the nightmare from dissolving into historical dust. For decades, we could assume this as a matter of course for the survivors were still among us. But as the years pass and a Holocaust survivor is now a rarity, how can we, the other Jews, accomplish this? Memorials and museums are powerful teachers. We weep but then we leave. Yom Hashoah, which is integrated into our calendar, brings us together as individuals, and a people. But still, after we weep, we leave.
It is only the survivor who can never escape. Hard as the rest of us try, we cannot even imagine their reality. Even the most horrible footage of emaciated bodies is unable to sustain the immediacy for long. Only those who have endured prolonged suffering internalize it. The rest of us feel their pain from a distance. This does not diminish our love or sympathy or profound compassion. But is it enough to sustain remembrance in the future?
Judaism places great emphasis on stories. This Passover, we told the grand story of bitterness, redemption and freedom around the seder table. We did not witness the exodus, but we tell the story as if we did, in every generation. It must become the same with the Holocaust. We who were spared the barbed wire must taste its bitterness and tell the story, in every generation. Jews must be ever vigilant against the anti-Semitism and complicity of silence that made the Holocaust. Yes, we must tell the story. We owe it to the survivors, to ourselves, and to humanity, present and future.
