Liberal Judaism’s Chief Executive Officer, Rabbi Charley Baginsky, recorded a special Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2 for Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD).

You can listen to it here (from 2:27:00) or read the text below:

I have heard some rabbis say that they keep their families out of their sermons and musings. Anyone who has ever heard me speak will know that the opposite is true.

It is not simply that I am a proud mother who, like many others, cannot help but open her mouth and talk about her offspring, but rather that they shine a light so clearly on issues and emotions that perhaps previously had been merely theoretical. But it is not just my children who enter my words and thoughts but also those who went before me, formed me and shaped me and also those who did so by their absence.

Today is National Holocaust Memorial Day, a day for everyone to remember the millions of people murdered in the Holocaust, under Nazi Persecution, and in the genocides which followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.

I have found myself thinking a lot about the words of Joe Biden as he led communal mourning for all those who have died from Covid, he said: “ To heal, we must remember”.

The Jewish rituals around death are ones which force us to confront loss and do not allow us to avoid tragedy, we are told to pick up the earth at graveside with our own hands and throw it onto the casket. The mourner – must carry out the most painful task of confrontation. That does not mean however, that Judaism is a masochistic religion, but it is a sense of reality. Meaning is to struggle and have pain, to heal we must face that which we are remembering.

This for me is the centrality of marking Holocaust Memorial Day, of remembering the rows and rows of empty chairs left by genocide, the stories not told, the songs not sung, the futures not realised. It is to remember that part of who my children are, the stories I tell them and the people I want them to be are shaped by those who died in death camps during the Holocaust, my great uncles – Egon and Willie, whose names live on in my uncle and my father and who would be so proud of the next generations who carry their memory.

We heal when we remember, when we confront our past and name it and commit again as a nation that we will never again let this happen anywhere, to anyone.