Yom HaShoah

Today is the designated Holocaust Remembrance Day. With ceremonies in many places around Jerusalem and around the world. We come together to remember the victims of the Holocaust whose lives were senselessly ended during World War II. It is a time to remember those to whom we are connected, and those that have nobody to remember them. But it is a day not only to remember the atrocities committed against millions of people.

For me it is a day to reflect. I think about the marginalized groups of people who were forced to leave their lives behind and rounded up into ghettos across Europe and I start to ask; why? These people were executed for committing crimes; being Jewish, being gypsy, being political dissidents, being homosexual and many other things. Their crime was being undesirable in the eyes of Hitler, the Nazis and the Third Reich of Germany.

It wasn't anything these people had done.

These people were killed because of hatred.
These people were murdered because they were not understood.
These people were slaughtered because they were different.

As I sit and think about these things I can't help but think about the losses this world suffered because of hatred, fear and misunderstanding. People suffered because other people were whipped into a frenzy and followed along.

In some ways this was a Jewish tragedy. In other ways it is a global tragedy. And it can serve as a lesson for us about the dangers of hatred.

May all of humanity never forget the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Yad Vashem

She knows somebody who works there. That was the excuse our Hebrew teacher came up with for us to visit Yad Vashem. It doesn't really take much for us to be convinced to visit there. But her friend works at a part of the memorial that I had never heard about before. The Valley of the Communities is a labyrinth that has the names of communities that were affected by the extermination during the Holocaust.

It was a pretty powerful exhibit to wander through. The walls are probably 30 feet high, and there is no roof or ceiling. Greenery growing on the edge and inching their way down into the labyrinth.

We were there for Hebrew class, and our guide walked us through the maze and told us pieces about the exhibit, entirely in Hebrew. It's starting to dawn on me that I am getting better with this language. I know I'm not that great, but I'm mostly functional. I'd say proficient, not fluent. But that's not the point today.

Orna, our teacher, took us to see the exhibit that is built to remember the Adolf Eichman trial (another thing we've read and talked about in Hebrew class). That's the third time I've been to Yad Vashem, and I still haven't repeated large sections of the memorial. It's still a very moving place to go.