Starting on the eve of Yom Hashoa- holocaust remembrance day- I find myself restless and don’t know where to place my emotions.
A myriad of thoughts go through my mind.
A jumble of thoughts and memories and half memories.
Memories from my trip to Poland, things that I heard from family friends, the stories that are still very alive in my wife’s family, everything that I’ve studied and come across as a Jewish educator and much more.
In the time leading up to the siren I have too much going on in my mind to think clearly.
As Hani said yesterday after she told our kids about her grandparents- ‘It is with us all year round- yom hashoah is for everyone else’. True to a degree.
The siren sounds. A blaring noisy silence. I think back to the hall of names in Yad Vashem where the names of holocaust victims are collected.
The most striking aspect of the hall is that most of it is empty.
All memory- Even the names of more than half of the victims are unknown. in the emptiness of those shelves I see the infinite possibilities of what could have been.
The non-ending generations of the Jewish people that were erased.
How our people were treated as non humans
How humans lost all of their humanity
How so much land in Europe feels cursed to me.
How Anti-Semitism never disappeared and is growing once again
These fill me with sadness, pain, thoughtfulness and anger all at the same time.
I am here as a proud Jew to protect my people wherever they are, to make sure this doesn’t happen again and most importantly to make sure that Jewish life, culture and religion flourish
Yom Hashoah 2019
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- memorial stone in treblinka for jews from the town of bialystok (poland) where my paternal grat grandparents came from
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- Treblinka was a death camp in which everyone who arrive was put straight to death. The camp was completely destroyed by the Germans, and the rocks were placed to remember each cirty or town from which jews were murdered at Treblinka
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- memorial stones in the death camp of treblinka
