We Are Our Own Deliverance
By Sadie Hilf
What are we to do with the Holocaust?
At time of writing, we are 87 years out from the passage of the Nuremberg Laws. We are 77 years out from the liberation of the last concentration camps.
So what are we to do with the Holocaust?
Many people around the world are of the opinion that the modern state of Israel only occurred because of global sympathy and penance over the events of the Holocaust. However, this is likely not the case as there were already large numbers of Jews in the British Mandate already organizing to form a state. The Yishuv population along with the first and second wave of Aliyah had already solidified the Jewish presence in the region after the 2000 year diaspora. In addition, the Balfour declaration had assured Jewish self-governance in the land after the British withdrawal from the region. At most, the Holocaust served as a catalyst.
So what are we to do with the Holocaust?
How do we grapple with the almost simultaneous mass extinction and mass renewing of our people? There is a significant portion of the Israeli 1948 population that was made of Holocaust survivors. People that not even four years prior were on the brink of death and lost so many of their friends and family were now the re-founders of an ancient state. Are we to be sad, happy, joy, or any other type of emotion at this condition we found ourselves in and still find ourselves grappling with 74 years after 1948.
The narrative of the weak Jews of Europe has persisted since the liberation of the camps by the Americans and the Red Army. Those people had to have been weak since they had allowed themselves to be slaughtered. Yet no one celebrated when the Jews put up resistance or simply tried to escape from the Reich. They were criticized and reprimanded for their disobedience.
Yet we lived. Many died, but a remnant survived. Many in this remnant moved westward to America, but some returned home to the east- to Eretz Yisrael. And there they faced more hardships at the hands of the British and the Arab populations. But their Jewish cousins welcomed them, integrated them, trained them.
Then not even four years later, they were called upon. They once again provided resistance against people intent on wiping the Jews off the face of the map. They were once again criticized and many in the West trended toward inaction and disapproval of their actions once again. But in spite of all of it, they once again prevailed.
Yet in this fledgling little state that they and so many others had fought, bled, and in some cases even died for, they looked back on their not so recent history at this incomprehensible event. And they said “We must remember”. They had to remember because they had survived it, and they could already see the tide of the Arab world ebbing to flow once again in a new wave that would attempt to discredit their history. They would make the world remember.
So in 1959, 11 years after the refounding of the State of Israel, the first Yom HaShoah was observed on the 27th of Nissan. This date was not chosen at random, but was rather carefully selected as it was the Hebrew date of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. It was the date the Jews had provided their own deliverance. So there was no date more appropriate in the fledgling Zionist project known as Israel to remember those who had been so brutally murdered and cast aside by the world.
This date said “We remember when you did not care. We remember because you do not. We remember because we will ensure our own future.”
So what are we to do with the Holocaust?
We are to grieve. Grieve at the absolutely horrific loss of life our people endured. Grieve at our families’ and close friends’ lasting wounds from the tragedy. We are to remember. Remember those we lost and make sure the world is never able to bury the tragedy it was complicit in.
But we are also to live. Live and enjoy life and to be Jews. Because we are our own deliverance.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nurnberg-Laws
https://medium.com/history-uncut/was-israel-created-because-holocaust-12f4f5ffc4b9
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/warsaw-ghetto-uprising
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