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Yom HaShoah
2007
Remembering and Acting
On Sunday, April 15th we will commemorate Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance day. If you have ever been in Israel at this time it is one of the most memorable moments. To hear the deafening siren throughout the streets, to see every individual stop their cars exit a bus, stop walking, and pause, taking note that there are those that came before us whose lives where cut short because of senseless hatred and the world stood idly by too long. The moment of silence with the siren sounding is the loudest most deafening silence that I believe exists. The siren and silence is truly the God Elijah heard in the “Kol Demma Daka,” the still small voice.
Everyone stands and hears the silence, and just like that at the end of the siren people get back in their cars, walk back on a bus, continue shopping and finish their meal, returning to their daily chores. And so our remembrance continues every year.
But is it enough to remember, to recount the horrors that had befallen our people? In Hebrew school we teach our youth a phrase that has been ingrained into part of every Jewish heart, a phrase that needs to stir us from idleness, a phrase that when uttered reminds us that we can not live our lives in complacency – Never Again. Two words that we will always know their symbolism, but what do they really mean?
At the University of Colorado in Boulder every year we sponsor a Holocaust Awareness Week to bring to the forefront the horrors of the Holocaust and educate the community of our tragic history. This year, the students on campus embraced these two words and not only remembered the lives of our collective families’ that perished but celebrated the righteous acts of individuals who risked their lives to save another. Throughout the week, the underlying characteristic that all these righteous individuals possessed was a sense of goodness, seeing themselves as human beings, not heroes but average individuals doing what was right.
One individual who had a great impact was Sir Nicholas Winton, an English stockbroker. While in Prague on vacation, he saw hundreds of Czech children in refugee camps and realized their unfortunate fate at the hands of the Nazis. He organized the deportation of over 600 children to England, with no existing infrastructure, and for no other reason than there was no other choice. Like many other righteous individuals of the Holocaust, he saw himself not as a hero on some great pedestal, but rather as average person doing what was necessary at the time.
Righteous gentiles are models for us today: to act, not as heroes but as average people doing what is necessary. To stand up and truly live by the words, Never Again. Can we, with integrity, say that we have lived up to these two words or will they continue to haunt us for generations to come, when our children say to us, how could you allow genocides to continue while preaching the words, Never Again.
Hillel, as an organization charged to provide meaningful Jewish experiences to college students, must be at the forefront of change and to respond to these words. We must collectively come together and act like those who saved thousands in the Holocaust, as average people, seeing the suffering and persecution of another human being and acting to make a difference.
Every year we commemorate the disaster of the Holocaust, remember the six million Jews whose lives ended so abruptly, the hundreds of Jewish towns that were destroyed, the millions of stories lost forever, and say Never Again. But this year I can only hope that those two words will ring in all of our ears and hearts and move us to action to not stand idly by while the blood of our brother in Darfur is being spilled. It is our responsibility, in fact a positive mitzvah, a commandment from the Torah, to act on behalf of the innocent victims in Darfur. I can only hope and wish that we will look back on this time, and with integrity say to one anotherm, we responded to the genocide in Darfur and upheld the teaching of Never Again.
Written by Rabbi Adam Naftalin-Kelman, Director of Hillel at the University of Colorado Boulder
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