Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah, Holocaust Memorial Day 2019
Originally given at Brighton Holocaust Memorial Day Public Meeting
Good evening, everyone. The theme of this year’s National Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations is ‘Torn From Home’. We are painfully aware that hundreds of thousands of people across the world are torn from their homes each year and find themselves taking flight from war and tyrannical regimes. Over the past few years, the news has been dominated by the global refugee crisis. Current UNHCR figures reveal that 68.5 million people around the world have been forced from home, including 25.4 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18.1
The devastating genocide known as the Holocaust – more of that particular word in a moment – began with the marginalisation and isolation of the Jews of Germany after the Nazis came to power in 1933, which then transmuted into a campaign of violent persecution on 9th November 1938, known as Kristallnacht, ‘the night of the broken glass’. But much more than glass was broken on that terrifying night. Synagogues and Jewish shops were burned down, thousands of Jews were assaulted and at least 91 were murdered. Within days, 30,000 Jewish men had been torn from their homes and incarcerated in concentration camps.2 My maternal grandparents had fled violent pogroms in czarist Russia in 1905 and settled in London’s East End. My paternal grandfather was one of the 30,000 deported after Kristallnacht. He was torn from his home in Vienna on the night of 13th November 1938 and sent to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. Beaten and tortured, he was later released on 19th January 1939, on condition that he and his family left the country. I have a copy of the Dachau concentration camp document, which includes his name and number, and the dates of his incarceration. My father, who had left Austria for South Africa in 1936, managed to arrange domestic permits for his parents to come as servants to England. Subsequently, they decided to go on to the United States. My grandfather never recovered from his ordeal. He never worked again, and eventually died of poor health in 1955 a few months after I was born. Of course, he was one of the ‘lucky ones’. Most of the wider family were murdered.
Even today, we haven’t grasped the enormity of the Holocaust. Nor the specificity. At the heart of the Nazi programme lay Hitler’s determination to wipe out the Jewish people. The Nazis rejected all groups they considered did not fit the mythic ideal of the Aryan, white, blue-eyed, blond Master Race: Jews, the Roma, the disabled, as well as gay men, lesbians, non-conforming women and socialists. However, Jews alone were victimised because they were regarded as demonic persecutors. The Nazis did not invent this central motif of Jew-hatred. The notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Russia in 1903, depicts Jews as an alien menacing elite controlling the world.3 But the Nazis were not only the most determined Jew-haters in the long history of anti-Semitism, they also managed to create the machinery to achieve their vision of a Europe that was Judenfrei, ‘free of Jews’, and Judenrein, ‘clean of Jews’. And so, in less than six years, half the Jews of Europe, one third of the world Jewish population had been murdered. In 1938 the world Jewish population was 18 million. In 1945, 12 million remained. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Jewish communities were destroyed across Europe never to be restored. I will never forget how going on a rabbinic delegation to Berlin in 2005 to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the Sho’ah brought home to me the Nazi determination to exterminate Jewish life. As part of our programme, we visited the villa on the Wannsee, the lake outside Berlin, where the Nazi top brass had met together in 1942 to work out the ‘final solution’.4 One of the items in the exhibition was particularly chilling. It was a typed list of the Jewish populations of Europe, with a total at the foot of the page: 11 million. Hitler didn’t quite succeed in hitting that target. Of course, Britain featured on the list, and alongside, a number: 500,000. Only a narrow strip of water, and the courage of British airmen ensured that Hitler did not reach these shores.
Because the Nazi machine was directed first and foremost at killing Jews, it’s not surprising that the Jewish people has a special word for the fathomless horror: Sho’ah; a word of Biblical origins, meaning ‘devastation’.5 Sho’ah is not the Hebrew translation for ‘Holocaust’. Look in the dictionary of Biblical Hebrew edited by Christian Doctors of Divinity, Brown, Driver and Briggs, and first published in 1906, and you will find that ‘holocaust’ is the translation of the Hebrew word, olah, ‘burnt offering’.6 For Jews, it is inappropriate, to say the least, to speak of the murder of the Jews of Europe as an offering to God. There was nothing ‘sacred’ about the smoking crematoria of the death camps.
This evening, we are engaged in a special moment of commemoration. This past Sunday, 27th January, was Holocaust Memorial Day itself – the date chosen because it is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army in 1945, which marked the beginning of the end of the Sho’ah. The Sunday News included the findings of a Holocaust Memorial Day Trust survey of 2000 UK adults. The research revealed that 5% do not believe that the Holocaust took place and one in 12 believe that its scale has been exaggerated.7 More education about the Sho’ah is essential. More empathy for the suffering of others is essential. A commitment to challenging the demonisation of others is essential. These are the threefold tasks of commemoration.
For Jews, remembrance is a commandment: Zachor! Remember! And what we are, compelled to remember above everything else, is that we were ‘slaves in the land of Egypt.’ But we are not called to remember just in order to re-tell our story. We recall the Exodus from Egypt, at the Festival of Pesach – Passover – each spring, and also each Shabbat – Sabbath – on the day of rest that is also a day of freedom, in order to remember the lessons of our oppression and suffering. We read in the Book of Exodus, chapter 23 (:9): “Do not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart [nefesh]8 of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” And in the Book of Leviticus chapter 19 (33-35): “When strangers sojourn with you in your land, you shall not oppress them. / The strangers that dwell with you shall be as the home-born among you, and you shall love them as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Eternal your God.” And in the Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 24 (:17-18a): “You shall not pervert the justice due to the stranger, or to the orphan; or take the widow’s garment as a pledge; / rather, you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt…” The assumption in all these verses – and more – is that if we would only remember what it feels like to be marginalised and excluded, if we would only remember what it feels like to be a stranger in a strange land, if only we would remember the injustice we experienced, then we would ensure that we would not oppress the stranger and the vulnerable in our midst; on the contrary, we would treat the stranger with justice ‘as the home-born’ and love the stranger as we love ourselves.
Jews are a remembering people. But remembrance is not an end in itself. The persecution of those considered ‘other’ was not – and is not – just a Nazi crime. All the genocides since the Sho’ah have targeted ‘others’ – those not considered to be ‘like us.’ And to this day the hatred of the other continues. National Holocaust Memorial Day was inaugurated in Britain in 2000 to acknowledge the enormity and significance of the Holocaust and to acknowledge the genocides that have happened since 1945, and promote educational activities so that children, in particular, actively engage in learning the lessons of the past for the sake of the future. And so, since NHMD was inaugurated, commemoration has also focused attention on the genocides in Cambodia (1975-79), Bosnia (1992-95), Rwanda (1994) and Darfur (2003). It is vital that National Holocaust Memorial Day remains a date in the calendar of this country, enabling people to learn about the specificity of each case of genocide and to understand the social, cultural, political, and economic conditions that make it possible for one group to target another and single them out for destruction. The persecution of the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar that involved the torching of their villages, and has resulted in the exile of over 700,000 people9, and the oppressive surveillance of the Uighur Muslims and other Muslim groups in China10, not only replay the strategy of ethnic cleansing as carried out in the early 1990s in Bosnia, these appalling persecutions also have all the hallmarks of genocide-in-the-making, if not brought to a halt.
This evening, as we recall the tens of thousands of ‘lucky’ refugees, who were torn from their homes during the Nazi era, those who escaped, and the many millions, who were murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices because they could not escape, let us commit ourselves to the task of helping those were torn from their homes today. Let us be among those who are taking action in support of refugees – action that includes, for example, lobbying local authorities to accept more refugees and provide them with accommodation.11 Of course, finding homes for refugees will not solve the global refugee crisis; as in the Second World War, international cooperation is required to confront the root causes. But as any refugee, or child or grandchild of a refugee will tell you, providing refuge to those in flight is the only way of ensuring their survival. May this evening’s commemoration inspire us to continue to do what we can as individuals and as communities to support refugees and to challenge the scores of oppressive regimes that scar the world.
1 https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html
2 For an authoritative and accessible history of the Sho’ah, see: The War Against the Jews 1933-1945 by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Penguin Books, 1975.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion
4 See: The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution by Mark Roseman, Penguin Books, 2003.
5 See, for example Isaiah 47:11.
6 Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon edited by Francis Brown, D.D., D.Litt. with the cooperation of S.R. driver, D.D., Litt.D, and Charles A. Briggs, D.D., D.Litt. Hendrickson publishers, 2006, p. 750.
7 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47015184
8 The literal translation of nefesh is ‘being’.
9 https://donate.unhcr.org/gb/rohingya/
10 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-45474279
11 For example: Brighton Migrant Solidarity. See: https://brightonmigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com/ In addition to petitioning Brighton and Hove Council to accept more refugees, Brighton Migrant Solidarity has also launched Thousand 4 £1000, a project that raises funds through small regular donations to provide the rent for secure accommodation for vulnerable migrants in the Brighton and Hove area. BMS is asking for £1 a month from 1000 people to secure a property. ‘Our hope is that Brighton & Hove will be a space where everybody can find a home.’ https://brightonmigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com/1000-for-1000/
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