Showing posts with label never again. Show all posts
Showing posts with label never again. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Never Again: Concentration Camp Tour Motivates Messianic Jew - S. MICHAEL CHARISMA NEWS

Entrance gates to the Nazis' Dachau concentration camp. (Wikimedia Commons )

Never Again: Concentration Camp Tour Motivates Messianic Jew

S. MICHAEL  CHARISMA NEWS
Standing With Israel
When I was 19, I moved to Israel to join the army. I came with intense Zionism and a deep sense of responsibility to protect my people.
Since I am Jewish, it only made sense, and when I landed on Israeli soil I had only one thing in mind—drafting into the Israeli Defense Forces. After arriving and getting settled, the army finally called me up. The months of basic training felt like nothing compared to the fire inside of me.
During training we learned many things: Zionism, Israeli politics, Judaism, and Hebrew—and we also learned about the Holocaust. This had a particular influence on my unit as most of them were great-grandchildren of survivors. Our commanders emphasized to us: "Never Again!" or, in Hebrew: LeOlam Lo!
Shortly after basic training we became "official" soldiers in the IDF, and to do so we had swear into the army. During this special ceremony we swore to "Never Again!" allow such horrors to befall our people. We understood that our training allowed us to make sure that the Jewish people would remain forever safe in our homeland. It was a powerful moment for us as we stood with our guns and swore that "Never Again!" would an enemy annihilate the nation of Israel.
Reminiscing about it now makes that day since I completed my service and was released—nearly two years ago—seem like a very distant memory for me. But all of my training and service came back to me recently when we pulled up to the courtyard at Dachau in Germany.
A long pathway dotted with sturdy, tall trees welcomed us. The silence of the place was eerie as we started walking down the gravel road. Each step drawing closer to the gates ahead, the tour guide didn't say a word and the only sound was that of our footsteps against the stony ground. It was hot and the sun seemed relentless, as the heat of summer should have faded by then, but instead it felt like a cruel punishment on such a long day.
Arbeit macht frei, "work for freedom" sprung into my head as the gate became visible. I didn't know German, but I knew what the sign said. They made us study it in basic training. Work for freedom. What a distortion. Freedom meaning death. Work to death ... work to freedom.
It was the first time I had ever entered the snare of a Nazi death camp. The tour guide stopped us just before entering the gate; she explained that Dachau was the first concentration camp ever built by the Nazis, and it was to be used as an example camp. It was known to be especially brutal.
For me, the tour was personally moving. Being Jewish myself, I was painfully affected by the thought that thousands—if not millions—of my people were tortured, neglected and murdered inside these very walls. Our guide explained to us the cruelties my people endured. The reality of everyday life was unbearable to comprehend. Here, my people died, simply because they, like me, were Jews. The tour led us around the entire campus—from the fields where prisoners endured harsh labor, to the barricades, to the processing offices, and then to the showers.
Later in our tour, the guide brought us to a long narrow corridor. She explained to us that these chambers were used for torture by the SS guards. She turned her attention towards the non-Jewish victims of the Nazis and explained how several Christian pastors were also victims and died at the hands of Nazi torture. Amongst the millions of prisoners, three barracks towards the back of the camp were reserved only for Christians: those that stood strong in their faith and refused to align themselves with the monstrous beliefs of the Nazis.   
The hall was long and cold. The only noise heard was the sound of our breathing. Looking down the hall you could see small rays of sun blasting through the tiny windows on the doors, proving that perhaps there still can be light in the darkest of places. We walked down the hall together, trying to comprehend what had taken place in these cells.
We were in the torture chambers.
The hall was cold and rooms held their own demons. The chamber seemed to go on forever—so many rooms, so many horrible acts committed here. The hall just kept going and going to what felt like the length an entire football field. I stopped and peeked through each door to the rooms inside. Each room was entirely empty, cold, and the paint was peeling off the walls. The windows had large black shades that had been pulled back to let the sun in, but when prisoners were in these rooms I am sure it was entirely black.
Each room brought with it a new spirit of evil and each room seemed to get darker and darker, letting in little to no light. I felt like I couldn't go on any longer imagining what had happened in these torture closets. I wanted to scream, run out, and find the sun light I had complained about earlier. I felt the darkness consuming me. Jews, Christians, politicians, scientists, professors, fathers, brothers, humans were all kept here under the worse conditions that are still incomprehensible to us.
The last door on the right side of the corridor had light shining through the small window. It was guiding me to the end. As I reached the end I looked into the window where the light was coming from. There in the middle of the room, on a small table, arms spread out and legs bound, was a small crucifix of Jesus Christ. On his head was etched the words "King of the Jews."
The sight took my breath away. I grew up as a Messianic Jew, believing in Jesus—or, as I grew up calling him, Yeshua—as my Messiah. I stood there for a very long time contemplating the meaning of this moment. The Nazis attempted to eliminate the King of the Jews from the face of the earth by eliminating his people, his family—his flesh and blood—and attempting to silence those who stood tall in faith of Him. I take it as a great responsibility, being a Jew and one who believes in Messiah Yeshua, to never forget all those that died in these chambers. Both my spiritual brothers and sisters as well as my physical brothers and sisters.
As we left the chambers I took off my backpack and pulled out my Israeli flag and my unit patch that I earned serving in the IDF. It was only just a couple of short years ago that I swore into the ranks of the army. I swore that nothing like what I just saw would ever happen again. During the ceremony I chose to swear in on both the Old Testament and the New Testament, combining the heritage of my fathers with the faith of my redemption. That day, I stood with an Israeli flag in hand and swore once again: "Never Again!" I affirmed that "Never Again!" would my people be led to the slaughter.
Messianic Jews also have the duty of never allowing the name of the Messiah Yeshua to be defamed in such a horrible way. As the Jews were being led to the gas chambers or to the mass graves, the Messiah was not merely mourning their suffering, rather He was suffering with them. The fact that some of His followers allowed, or even encouraged this to happen, has left a dark black stain on the name of Jesus in the eyes of the wider Jewish people. As a Messianic Jewish believer, I'm also strongly connected to my duty to assure that the stain is taken from the name of Jesus and that it become known that He was suffering with the Jewish people, not causing it.
Messiah came for all of humanity. He came to save us, redeem us and give us the message of the kingdom of God. We do not always hear stories of Jews and Christians being slaughtered next to each other during the Holocaust. We sometimes forget about the faithful Christians who raised their voices in protest against the murder of the Jews, and against the evils of Hitler and his minions. But they were there. We were all together, and Christ was also with us, suffering right alongside us.
Today, the Christian voice for Israel is stronger than ever. Evangelicals are some of the loudest voices for pro-Israel advocacy. The Christian voices lost in the Holocaust are resurrecting in our day. As Jews and Christians, let us join our voices together and ensure that something as atrocious as the Holocaust will never again happen. May we, as the people of God, followers of Jesus our Messiah, take this stance together and raise this cry in unison: never again. 
S. Michael works as a writer for First Fruits of Zion (ffoz.org) a Messianic Jewish ministry based in Israel, Canada and the United States. She works within the Messianic Jewish communities both in Israel and in America. She is currently a student in Israel with hopes to continue in ministry work.
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Thursday, May 5, 2016

Joel C. Rosenberg's Blog: Never Again, Never Forget: On Holocaust Remembrance Day, here are four true heroes to remember.

auschwitz-joelontracks


New post on Joel C. Rosenberg's Blog

Never Again, Never Forget: On Holocaust Remembrance Day, here are four true heroes to remember. Who will be the heroes of our time, standing against evil & genocide?

by joelcrosenberg
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. -- Santayana
Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Here in Israel, the sirens will sound at precisely 10am. Every car, truck, bus and taxi cab will pull to a stop. Every worker will lay down his tools. Every classroom will fall silent. Every Jewish Israeli, regardless of what he or she is doing, will stand at attention, listen to the wail of the sirens, and remember those who were ruthless sent to the gas chamber, simply because they were Jews.
How will you remember the Holocaust today? How will you teach your children about the most horrific attempt to exterminate a single people group in the history of mankind?
I encourage you to make time today to remember the six million Jews -- including 1.5 million children -- were systematically murdered by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Read the stories below. Share them on social media. Visit a Holocaust Museum. Watch Schindler's List or one of the other great films about what happened. Read Elie Wiesel's Night. Better yet, find a survivor -- or the son or daughter of a survivor -- and ask them to share their story with you and your family.
Let us honor their memories, and pledge ourselves never to forget them. In so doing, let us pledge to never allow such evil to happen again.
This is not just a time for Jews to remember, or the world to remember the Jews. This is a day for all of mankind to take a decisive stand against evil and against genocide in our time. This is especially critical in the face of the continuing Iranian nuclear threat and the apocalyptic regime in Tehran's repeated vows to annihilate the U.S. and the State of Israel. It is also critical in the light of the genocidal rampage against Muslims, Christians and Yazidis that the apocalyptic leaders of the Islamic State are engaged.
My hope and prayer this year is that in addition to remembering those who died in the “Shoah” (the Holocaust), we will also remember those who lived -- especially four extraordinary heroes who actually escaped from Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 not only to save their own lives but to tell the world the truth about what the Nazis were doing.
I first learned about these men and their extraordinary courage and selflessness upon visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland in 2011. Their stories intrigued me. Indeed, they inspired me to write the novel, The Auschwitz Escape.
Their names are:
  • Rudolf Vrba
  • Alfred Wetzler
  • Arnost Rosin
  • Czeslaw Mordowicz
In 2014, I wrote a column specifically sketching out their dramatic saga, based on the research I did for the book, including meeting with some of the world's leading Holocaust scholars at Yad Vashem here in Israel. I hope you’ll take a moment to read the whole column, and then share it with others.
They are worth remembering. They are worth emulating. Indeed, as darkness falls once again in the epicenter and around the world, may their tribe increase.
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joelcrosenberg | May 5, 2016 at 5:51 am | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/piWZ7-4C2

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Never again. Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Day & Heroism Remembrance Day



Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Day), or Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laGvura (the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day)

We especially remember our Jewish friends around the world on this day.

Steve Martin
Love For His People
Charlotte, NC





Monday, May 18, 2015

Masada Like You've Never Seen ✡ "My Kindness and My Fortress"

My kindness and my fortress, my high tower and my deliverer, my shield in Whom I take refuge

PSALMS (144:2)
 

חַסְדִּי וּמְצוּדָתִי מִשְׂגַּבִּי וּמְפַלְטִי לִי מָגִנִּי וּבוֹ חָסִיתִי

תהילים קמד:ב

khas-dee u-m'-tzu-da-tee mis-ga-bee u-m'-fal-tee lee ma-gi-nee u-vo kha-see-tee

Today's Israel Inspiration

Here's why Masada is Israel's #1 tourist destination after Jerusalem. Along with its sheer height and incredible ancient ruins, the story of the Jewish zealots who withstood a three-year siege by the Romans has become a symbol of heroic resistance. In their last days, a man named Eleazar Ben Yair made this final speech: "My loyal followers, long ago we resolved to serve neither the Romans nor anyone else but only God, who alone is the true and righteous Lord of men." Thereafter, the zealots took their own lives to avoid capture, save for two women and their few children in hiding. Masada stands symbolically for 'never again shall we fall,' and in Hebrew, "Masada" מצדה comes from the word in our verse meaning "fortress."
 

Hebrew Music Monday

In honor of recent Jerusalem Day, we bring you Dudu Fisher's beautiful rendition of "If I Forget You Jerusalem" based on Psalm 137. Learn the words in Hebrew with our helpful transliteration.

Stunning Aerial Video of Masada

You'll have to excuse our excitement at including a second video today, but this stunning footage of Masada is too good to miss!

Jerusalem Dove

The dove is a symbol of our true desire for peace in the Holy Land. Get this beautiful figurine of a dove atop beautiful Jerusalem buildings and skyline.

Today's Israel Photo

Ancient ruins on Masada by Noam Chen. Located in the Judean Desert, Masada's fortress included storehouses, living quarters, an armory, two large palaces originally built by Herod, as well as ritual baths, a synagogue and cisterns that were refilled by rainwater.
 

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Thursday, April 16, 2015

Messianic Initiative Helps Bring Holocaust Healing

Messianic Initiative Helps Bring Holocaust Healing

Thursday, April 16, 2015 |  David Lazarus  ISRAEL TODAY
“When I stood before the actual baby clothing, little dresses and tiny shoes that had been stripped off the infants being thrown into the gas chambers, I just couldn’t take it,” said Tehilah, one of the young Jewish girls who came to Auschwitz with a Messianic initiative called Yad B’yad, which means "Hand in Hand" in Hebrew.
“Standing there paralyzed, holding hands with my German partner, we both broke down crying and could not stop weeping as we held each other and walked through that horrible place,” she recalled. “Something very deep was healed in both of us.”
Every year since 2005, Messianic Jewish leaders in Israel together with their German partners have taken hundreds of Jewish and German youth aged 16-18 to walk through Auschwitz in the Yad B’yad program.
This bold Messianic initiative’s vision is clear: “The pain and the shame of the Holocaust have left deep scars on both Jew and German. They need help to walk together from memory – through friendship – to a shared future."
More than half of all Israeli high schools have since the 1980s sent tens of thousands of Jewish youth to Poland and to Auschwitz to learn the history of the Holocaust. “Many of our children coming back from these trips suffer from nightmares, anxiety and even some cases of depression,” said Batya Herpas, a local city chairperson with the Department of Education. “There are many problems and unresolved issues with the current high school trips to Poland.”
Members of Herpas’ city counsel noticed that the Yad B’yad participants didn’t seem to have the same problems, and that the program could help bring healing and resolution, rather than more pain and anger to their high school teens.
When Roi Keshet, a history teacher in a local Israeli high school, heard about the Messianic Yad B’yad initiative he said that it had been his dream to see Jewish and German teens walking together through Auschwitz. Quoting from Ezekiel 17, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge,’ he admitted that, “We have a problem with a victim mentality in this country and it is time to bring healing for both German and Jewish youth.”
Many German government officers and education officials have also shown interest in the Yad B’yad journey for their communities. The mayor of Berlin recently hosted a public event in the city square for Yad B’yad kids to tell their stories of how they were helping one another overcome the past and create hope for the future.
“When I saw all the barracks and the destroyed gas chambers,” said Annika, one of the German participants, “I realized for the first time how guilty my nation was and is! I understood what my country did! This was when I understood how important it is to ask for forgiveness… I separated from the group and I asked Julia (her Jewish partner) in the name of my family and in the name of my nation Germany for forgiveness and she forgave me in the name of her family and her nation.”
A Jewish participant named Esther recalled: “At the entrance to Birkenau there are train tracks. We walked in pairs (Jew and German) for about ten minutes holding hands… then each pair sat and prayed together. At first my partner and I were silent, then we began sharing our hearts with each other about what we had just seen. We were both in tears… Then my partner began to pray for me in German and even though I couldn't understand her, it was like God's grace touching my heart."
While in Auschwitz, the young ones light candles as a reminder that even through the darkest hours of human history our people have not been destroyed. It is a small light to remind all of us that hope is our strength, not anger. It is a light, however small, of hope for a future where they and their children’s children will find a way out of the darkness towards a day when we can all say together, “Never Again.”
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Monday, January 27, 2014

To murder 6 million people, the Nazis showed us, you don’t even need fanatics

INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY - To murder 6 million people, 
the Nazis showed us, 
you don’t even need fanatics

Buried at Auschwitz is our certainty in a shared humanity. 
We now know that any limits to human cruelty, if they exist at all,
lie beyond the most rabid viciousness ever conceived


 January 27, 2014 
THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
Prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau during liberation, in January 1945 (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)






WRITERS

Haviv Rettig Gur is The Times of Israel's political correspondent.
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AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU — It is hard to convey what was lost at Auschwitz. Through constant retelling, the numbers of the dead are well known. The gas chambers, the enslavement, the wanton killing are paradigmatic chapters of German and European history.

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The Holocaust also has a clear meaning for the Jews, its paradigmatic victims: as a dismayingly vast proof that there is no safety in European pluralism, culture or “civilization,” in high-minded talk of humanism, individualism and international community, or in calming analyses that downplay future threats.

These are all important reflections on the “lessons” and “meaning” of Auschwitz, but they constitute too much of our public conversation about it, almost as though we are willing to discuss any aspect of that event except the choking, shivering bodies of the real-life gas chamber. Auschwitz too often serves as a bludgeon for our social or political agendas, an instrument to express our own fears and passions. There is a vague consensus that Auschwitz reflects something ultimate and untouchable, and so we immediately set about sullying it.

This use and misuse of the Holocaust is often done for noble, honest reasons, for example by those advocates who, under the banner of “never again,” distill the Holocaust into a moral-political lesson about the dangers of the Nazis’ imagined ideological errors: racism, chauvinism.

The Holocaust was undoubtedly a product of its time and place, of Nazi racial theory and totalitarian psychology. But its “lesson,” its “significance,” is both more permanent and more immediate. The vast, meticulously engineered infrastructure of death; the murder conducted according to immutable categories of human beings, erasing the victims’ individuality, and thus any possible pretense to their guilt, in the very framing of the reasoning for their annihilation; and the intimacy of the murders, the physical proximity of murderer and murdered for weeks, months and years — with these hard-won achievements, the Nazis plumbed the depths of human mercilessness.

Seen up close, Nazism was less an experiment in totalitarianism or fanatical collectivism — the usual images associated with the Third Reich — than a test of the elasticity of the very boundaries of humanness.
The engineers

Thus we find an ordinary German company, Topf & Sons from the city of Erfurt (actual sign at the entrance to its administrative offices: “Always glad to serve you”) taking pride in being selected to build 46 furnaces to handle the daily disposal of over 10,000 corpses each day at Auschwitz.

The company even applied for a patent in 1941 for its continuously operating “corpse incineration oven,” apparently fearful its innovations in human corpse incineration technology would be stolen by competitors.

The engineers were under no illusions as to the purpose of their work. Asked in a March 1946 interrogation whether he knew “that in the gas chamber and in the crematoriums [that he helped build at Auschwitz] there took place the liquidation of innocent human beings,” Kurt Prufer, Topf & Sons senior engineer, said he did.

Auschwitz was a thoughtful, considered project, built and maintained by normative, highly educated family men devoted to their craft. Some were not even members of the Nazi party

“I have known since spring 1943 that innocent human beings were being liquidated in Auschwitz gas chambers and that their corpses were subsequently incinerated in the crematoriums,” he stated flatly.

By spring 1943, Prufer, one of the chief civilian engineers of the Auschwitz death machine, not only knew what he had built; he was actively engaged in its upkeep. He visited Auschwitz three times after that spring: in autumn 1943 “to inspect a fault in the construction of a Krema [crematorium] chimney,” in early 1944 to inspect the repairs on that chimney, and a final time in the fall of 1944 to consider the engineering challenges of relocating the death facilities as Soviet forces crept nearer.

Auschwitz was a thoughtful, considered project, built and maintained by normative, highly educated family men devoted to their craft. Some were not even members of the Nazi party.

By their skilled work, Auschwitz became startlingly efficient. Between 1941 and the closure of the death camp in January 1945, most of the inmates who arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau, at least 85% of them, or some 1.1 million people, were dead within four hours after their arrival.

To achieve that rate of industrial killing, the machinery had to be fast. Arrivals just off the train were told they were headed to showers. Outside the killing complex, the truck containing the Zyklon B gas was painted with the symbol of the Red Cross. In each of the two largest gas chambers, 2,500 arrivals could be killed in a single blow. Two smaller gas chambers could handle 1,800 each.

The bottleneck was not the gassing, which took just six to ten minutes before all the hundreds of arrivals lay in piles of dead, gaping corpses. It was the incineration process that frustrated the SS men throughout the camp’s operation and led to constant pressure to improve the facilities. It took 30-40 minutes to burn the three bodies that would fit in each oven (sometimes four, if a baby could be fit in between the adults). It was this bureaucratic pressure that gave the civilian engineers such an important role in the camp’s operation.

By the end of 1944, just weeks before the camp’s liberation by Soviet forces, 1,000 Jewish slave laborers were “employed” in the work of the death facilities, doing all parts of the work except the gassing itself. They herded the arrivals into the undressing hall, then into the gas chamber. They carried the bodies to the ovens for incineration, all under the watchful and vindictive eye of the SS guards.

The gassing itself was handled by a handful of SS officers trained to handle the Zyklon B gas.

It was a vast, monstrous mechanism, overseen by careful, thoughtful men and operating with pitiless efficiency for four long years. To murder six million people, the Nazis have convincingly shown us, you don’t even need fanatics.

So to say that Auschwitz is a warning against racism, or even against the dangers of desensitization and dehumanization under totalitarian regimes, is to miss the stark reality of the actual experience. At Auschwitz is buried our certainty in a shared humanity, in the undeniable, intrinsic value of the human being. These remain lofty ideals, to be sure, but they are no longer axioms premised on the human condition itself. Any limits to human cruelty, if they exist at all, lie beyond the most rabid viciousness ever conceived in the human imagination.



A Holocaust survivor talks to an Israeli delegation about his years at the Auschwitz death camp, as the delegation visits Auschwitz, Poland, as part of the March of the Living on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 7, 2013. (photo credit: Moshe Milner/GPO/FLASH90)

In a 1965 lecture, twenty years after the Holocaust and at the height of the nuclear fears of the Cold War, the social critic Theodor Adorno would wonder at the way in which Auschwitz shattered the pretense to “civilization” and undermined the universalist discourse of philosophers and moralists.

“In the face of the experiences we have had, not only through Auschwitz but through the introduction of torture as a permanent institution [a reference to the concentration camps] and through the atomic bomb — all these things form a kind of coherence, a hellish unity — in the face of these experiences the assertion that what is has meaning… become[s] a mockery; and in the face of the victims it becomes downright immoral. For anyone who allows himself to be fobbed off with such meaning moderates in some way the unspeakable and irreparable things that have happened by conceding that somehow, in a secret order of being, all this will have had some kind of purpose.

“…There can be no one, whose organ of experience has not entirely atrophied, for whom the world after Auschwitz, that is, the world in which Auschwitz was possible, is the same world as it was before.”
The Knesset visits

The Israeli Knesset lifted off from Ben Gurion airport early Monday, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, for the largest-ever Israeli state visit to Auschwitz.

Some 64 MKs are here, at least six cabinet ministers, a Supreme Court justice, the state comptroller, two dozen survivors and a panoply of journalists, European Jewish leaders and activists, Polish parliamentarians and dozens of security agents. Organized by the nonprofit organization From the Depths, whose executive director Jonny Daniels first brought the idea to Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein and then raised much of the funding for the event, the massive commemoration event marks an apex of over a decade of official commemorations and delegations from the State of Israel to the death camps of Europe.

That such gestures pale into insignificance when set against the event being commemorated is a tautology. But there is also an overarching political message to the commemorations: Israel guards the world’s Jews now; Israel remembers; Israel will never allow another Holocaust.

And, perhaps: Israel could have prevented the Holocaust had it been founded sooner.

This is an important declaration, often uttered by Israelis. But it is an unexamined declaration nonetheless. The Nazi race eastward across North Africa was not stopped in autumn 1942 by the nascent Jewish pre-state militias, but by imperial Britain. It is not clear that had Israel been founded by then, and the British withdrawn, that the last living Jewish civilization of the eastern hemisphere, the Hebrew-speaking Israelis, would have survived the war.

The Israelis, heirs to a historical experience of unprecedented mass-death and mass-expulsion across three continents, come to Auschwitz to renew their commitment — and recall the alternative — to Jewish self-reliance.

Yet these messages, though noble, are in an important sense as deaf to Auschwitz’s stark reality as the ideology behind “never again.” This deafness is evident in the “Holocaust fatigue” often heard from Israelis — in the cheap cynicism of journalists, in the disdain one often hears from young and old alike, in the discomfort around official Holocaust commemorations, there is always a noticeable but unarticulated exhaustion.

It is hard not to sympathize with this fatigue. The reality of Auschwitz is so monstrous, so immense, that the very contemplation of it is necessarily accompanied by guilt. When faced with the insatiable horror of the machinery of death, expressions of ordinary empathy or ritualized commemoration can seem pale and unfeeling.



An Israeli delegation seen visiting the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, April 8, 2013. (Photo credit: Yossi Zeliger/FLASH90)

And then there are the shallower political uses of the event. Yitzhak Rabin was a Nazi for going to Oslo, the settlers are “Judeo-Nazis,” and on and on. On left and right, the very power given to the vocabulary of the Holocaust by the clouds of human ash floating over the air currents of Europe is employed for the polemics of the moment — and as often by Jews as by anyone else.

Throughout it all, in the ignorance and intellectual neglect of political polemics, the actual killing is often lost. The men and women and children, the beating hearts and screaming voices, the killing for killing’s sake, the inescapability of death, the irretrievable moral world forever destroyed by Auschwitz — are secondary to the vicissitudes and passions of the moment.

It is a hopeful, touching sign, then, that Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein eschewed traditional Israeli discourse on Israel’s own relationship with the Holocaust, and instead issued a simpler, brief statement ahead of the trip that placed the victims themselves as the event’s central message.

”The elected parliament of the nation of Israel,” he said, “is traveling to the killing valley in order to feel part of the pain [of the victims] and allow its memory to be engraved in our hearts.”

Read more: To murder 6 million people, the Nazis showed us, you don’t even need fanatics | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/to-murder-6-million-people-the-nazis-showed-us-you-dont-even-need-fanatics/#ixzz2rcD7tHAL


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