As I stood still and absorbed the blaring Yom Hashoah siren that pierced and engulfed Jerusalem, that engulfed all of Israel, so many thoughts raced through my mind.
That siren. How triggering. How provoking.
It had been quite a few years since I lived here and was accustomed to hearing the annual siren that unites all Israelis as throngs across the country take a sacred pause in memory of the Six Milllion, and as homage to the Holocaust survivors among us.
Zachor.
Never forget.
It was Yom Hashoah v’Hagvura in Israel. Holocaust Memorial Day.
Normally my thoughts are centered on my ancestors — great-grandparents, countless aunts and uncles, and seemingly endless cousins, and so many survivors I grew to know and love. And of course, my own grandparents — escapees. And my own great-aunt and uncle — survivors.
This year, though, there were added layers.
In a post-Oct. 7 world, everything felt different.
It was Yom Hashoah, while Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day for its own soldiers, was pending and not officially until next week — yet, it’s war time, a terrible protracted war, and today, four more beautiful young soldiers were added to the day’s list of bereaved families, of fallen soldiers.
This land of miracles is also a land of grieving and much sorrow.
Was the piercing siren a siren for the past? Or is today’s Holocaust Memorial siren a siren for the present?
Is it Yom Hazikaron? Or is it Yom Hashoah? Are they different?
This year, to think of a specific day dedicated to Yom Hazikaron in a year when every day has been Yom Hazikaron, is not simple.
Normally there is that post-Pesach spring sequence of solemn days. Borrowing from the Days of Awe — autumn’s Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — many in Israel have come to also refer to this solemn couplet of days of Yom Hashoah and a mere few days later, Yom Hazikaron, as the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe.
The night before Yom Hashoah, on the way to the Western Wall, I walked through a silent downtown. Rows of chairs were already set in place in town squares at the municipal building, prepared for formal memorial ceremonies taking place the following morning.
Throughout downtwon, Yom Hashoah signs showing the infamous yellow star with the single word “Jude” inked on it appeared alongside waving flags.
Shops. Cafés. Everything was closed. A powerful pause was conferred upon the normally bustling downtown Jerusalem.
The illuminated ancient walls silhouetted against the night sky felt just beyond reach in the background.
On a recent trip to Spain, the cruel echoes of the past resonated and haunted me. Amidst Spain’s breathtaking beauty and postcard-worthy views, I couldn’t shake that feeling of the past.
We had just completed celebrating Pesach. And we survived the savage and ruthless Spanish Inquisition too.
We may have emerged limping, and sometimes still are, from the Holocaust.
But we also simultaneously rebuilt — the eternal people of history that we have become and are — even if this year, amidst these searingly painful days, we are shattered. It’s another day of burying the fallen IDF soldiers, our finest of the fine of our sons and daughters.
The continuum of history from Egypt to Spain to the Holocaust to our current Yom Hazikaron, all somehow merge into one.
Even on this Holocaust Memorial Day, when a little voice inside asks: Did the Holocaust end?
Yes, the concentration camps ended. Nazism was defeated.
But as the world perversely blames and rages against Israel, has the root motive of irrational hate against the Jewish people and against the one and only little state of the Jewish people —the hate that propelled the Holocaust, has it reached a terminal point?
Or is this current hate a cumulative hate on the same continuum as history’s hatred of the Jewish people that we have somehow, time and again, managed to outlive?
A blaring siren in a time of an acursed war will get you thinking.
Thinking about the neonatal unit in an Israeli hospital where as the staff of doctors and nurses stand still united in thought and purpose commemorating the Six Million, the powerful wail of the Holocaust memorial siren suddenly converges with an unmistakable sharp, high-pitched cry, the wail of a newborn baby just entering the world.
Thinking about the three IDF soldiers being buried at the very moment the siren blared — soldiers who were killed in southern Gaza by Hamas rockets as they, the soldiers, were providing and prioritizing humanitarian aid for Gazans.
Thinking that this year this piercing siren that is sounded out of respect for the Six Million is laden with a force like never before.
Today, in this time, in this fraught moment, it felt like the only place to be.
Standing with my people, amongst the intangible eternity that is the Jewish people.
© IJN 2024
