Holocaust, "HaShoah" Thoughts after a Visit to Yad Veshem

I wasn't raised with any awareness of the Holocaust, the Nazi murder of six million 6,000,000 Jews during World War Two. It's not that they were hiding any past, not at all. My parents were born in the USA, born in Brooklyn, New York, the same place I was born. Their parents all immigrated to the United States early in the 20th century. After the war, no surviving relatives joined them in New York. From what we can surmise, close to eighty 80 years later, none of the family which had stayed in Europe survived the war. 

Until very recently I felt rather shut out of Holocaust memorials. You had to be a survivor, pre-death camps escapee or descended from them to have a story. Since those who had actually experienced the Holocaust are quickly reaching the end of their lives and their children are grandparents and great-grandparents, their stories of survival and revenge over the Nazis have become legendary and inspiration for the growing genre of Holocaust literature. 

Ever since I first began learning about the Holocaust, as a child when The Diary of Anna Frank became popular and a short time later when Adolf Eichmann was captured then tried in Israel, the Holocaust seemed no more connected to me than Judah Maccabee of the Chanukah story. 

My parents did have relatives who had been living in Europe, mostly Belarus, which was then part of the Soviet Union. After World War Two, nothing was heard from them; they weren't found. In recent years, when I tried to join the Holocaust talk, I was told that my family story didn't count. I'm not in the club, since none of my relatives survived.

Last week I met a visiting cousin and his wife in Yad Vashem. Yad Veshem isn't my favorite place. That's because during my last visit, quite a while ago, I found myself very upset by their use of words about which I blogged Words, They Were All People and Praying to a Non-god. Please read them and tell me what you think in the comments, thanks.

We were taken around by one of their guides and given a very good history lesson. We passed a map of Belarus, and I managed to find Rogachev the city where both of my grandmothers had lived before moving to the United States. 

My paternal grandmother, Anna Brynien, was the second of six daughters. The four eldest and their parents immigrated to New York early in the 20th century, but my grandmother's two youngest sisters had been enthusiastic communists so they stayed in the Soviet Union. My maternal grandmother, Ida Vishnefsky, was from a large, relatively wealthy family. Her father was what was known as a barber-doctor. Everyone stayed in Belarus except my grandmother and one brother, who had immigrated to London. My grandmother followed her first husband to New York with their eldest daughter after visiting her brother in London. When the war ended, no survivors from my grandmothers' families were found.

My maternal great-grandfather
Vishnefsky

my maternal great-grandmother
Vishnefsky

One of the exhibits we toured was the Hall of Names dedicated to the dead.  I'm not sure that any of my missing family members are included in the names, but our guide told us that there are still boxes waiting for more names. 

Doesn't that make me and my cousins and children and grandchildren part of the Holocaust story?

The greatest tragedy of the Holocaust is that so many Jews may have no descendants; they didn't survive. That's what happened to my parents' aunts, uncles and cousins. The survivors in my family left Europe before the Nazis were a power. That's how my family survived. 

Hitler's plan was to kill all Jews, not just European ones. He had envisioned conquering the world; thank Gd he failed. 

The Jewish People have survived and thrived. Despite the murder of Six Million Jews by Hitler, the State of Israel was established with the Help of Gd just a very few short years after the Nazi defeat. 

The Jewish People survived and that makes ALL JEWS SURVIVORS!

Thank Gd, because Gd is our secret weapon.

America is Becoming a Danger for Jews. 47th Street isn't the USA

Via my Betar friends email list I received a video that was supposed to cheer me up, but instead it got me more depressed than I was after yesterday's visit to Yad Veshem.

Most of the American Jews who fully support the State of Israel live and work in a few "ghetto-like" areas throughout the states. That's why what you see by the end of the short film happened.  Please watch:


The results would be different almost any other place in the United States. The "Jew density" of 47th Street aka the "diamond district" is probably the most densely Jewish of any other place during work hours, between business owners, employees, customers and those just in the area passing by.

Paris anti-Israel Protest, Independent

I watched the earlier part of the film terrified for my American family and friends. Paris is moving to the USA. As I saw so well documented in Yad Veshem, things start slowly. There was a gradual escalation in the laws and restrictions against Jews.

The New York demonstration may not have had the missiles of the French one, but they were shouting "free Palestine" and "from the river to the sea," which makes it clear that they want and promote the destruction of the State of Israel.

Where else have such demonstrations taken place in the United States and what was the result of the other ones?

Personal Holocaust, Central Data Base

Archiving Personal Holocaust Experiences 

Yad Veshem

As the population of Holocaust survivors ages Yad Vashem is turning more of its energies into identifying and memorializing individual victims and archiving stories which show the human side of the Holocaust era. As author Judith Miller has said, we must remind ourselves that the Holocaust was not six million. It was one plus one plus one. Today Yad Vashem is reinventing itself to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust victims without the first-person presence of the survivors.

In 2000 Yad Vashem opened the Central Database of Shoah Victims Names. There were two goals of this database. Yad Vashem wanted to take the opportunity, while survivors and their children are still alive, to collect as many names of Holocaust victims as possible. In addition to memorializing these people by name the Shoah Victims Names project would enable survivors and their families to view other testimonies and, perhaps, identify family members who had either died at the hands of the Nazis or survived. To date a number of family reunifications have take place due to the database and the attention of the staff members who carefully review all inquiries.

Individuals are invited to submit a page of testimony, based either on their own first-person knowledge or information that was passed on to them by a family member. Pages of Testimony aim to identify people, by name, who were killed during the Holocaust. To review the pages of testimony (for free) a user logs into the database and enters whatever information he knows about the people for whom he's searching. The database is searchable in different languages and with varying spellings and pronunciations to help zero in on  names of people and places.

Irene Sendler
Lowell Milken Center

Yad Vashem has been putting more focus on developing relationships with the Haredi community. The new Yad Vashem museum, opened in 2005, differs from the old museum by including personal testimonies that focus on the experiences of a diverse group of people, many of whom express the fact that they were able to survive the Holocaust -- physically, spiritually or both -- because of their adherence to religious observance. Whereas in the old museum, the focus was on the scale of the Holocaust, the new museum includes 90 personal stories including stories that detail the challenge of religious observance during the Holocaust. In the words of Mooli Brog, chief knowledge officer at Birthright Israel, “The collectiveness and concentration on symbols in the old exhibition has been exchanged for more individual and personal narratives.”

In addition to the exhibit Yad Vashem now offers special courses for Haredi educators on teaching the Holocaust in their classrooms and gender-separate classes.

At one time Yad Vashem's Righteous Among the Nations section was mainly concerned with identifying and honoring individuals who had helped Jews survive during the years of WWII. The Righteous Among the Nations distinction was established by Yad Vashem in 1963 as a mechanism by which the State of Israel would recognize individuals who had risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. These included people such as Irena Sendler who sheltered Jews who were hiding from the nazis , provided false papers and false identities, helped Jews to escape and helped Jewish children.

Yad Vashem believes that most of the Righteous Gentiles have been identified and honored, but many of the stories have yet to be properly documented. As part of their personal testimonies project Yad VaShem is putting more effort into recording the stories of the Righteous Among the Nations and publicizing them.

Yad Veshem

Yad Vashem continues to publish its peer-reviewed semi-annual journal, Yad Vashem Studies, which features thought-provoking articles about the Shoah by leading thinkers and researchers from around the world. The journal aims to engage scholars and encourage multi-disciplinary discussion about a wide range of topics on all aspects of the Shoah with articles, documentary compendia, research reviews and new encyclopedias.

Israel's New Buddy, France

Photo: Koby Gideon/GPO

Yesterday afternoon/evening, when I got back from work, the Israeli news was a big special on Channel One about the visit of the French President to Israel.  It seemed to me that the crew on the screen were a bit confused and befuddled by the recent turn Israel's diplomatic status had taken.  They're much too used to fawning over everything American, and suddenly there's a new family on the block, the French.

The commentators seemed to know more about the history of French-American relations than of French-Israel.  For those of us long in the tooth, we remember that there was a time before the Americans paid much mind to Israel.  We were banned from even buying American weapons; forget about getting American shopping coupons aka "aid." That's when Israel had a better relationship with France.  We bought military weapons and supplies from them.  That is until the French joined the anti-Israel boycott after our victory in the 1967 Six Days War and reneged on a purchase contract for ships, the Cherbourg Project.

The Boats of Cherbourg was an Israeli military operation which took place on 24 December 1969, and involved the escape of five Sa'ar 3 class missile boats from the French port ofCherbourg. The boats had been paid for by the Israeli government but had not been delivered due to the French arms embargo in 1969.

French President Hollande and
PM Netanyahu in Yad Veshem

And of course, anyone with a minimum of knowledge of French History must remember the total capitulation of the French Government to the Nazis.

Vichy France, officially the French State (l'État français), was France during the regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain, during World War II, from the German victory in the Battle of France (July 1940) to the Allied liberation in August 1944.^[2] Following the defeat in June 1940, President Albert Lebrun appointed Marshal Pétain aspremier. After making peace with Germany, Pétain and his government voted to reorganize the discredited Third Republic into an authoritarian regime.

But today, all of a sudden, France is Israel's best friend.  Politics does make strange bedfellows, and recent international politics certainly isn't dull.

dry bones

I consider the dangers of a nuclear Iran to be international dangers, not just Israeli.  It frightens me to hear too many world leaders acting like we're the most threatened by the Iranians.  Netanyahu did explain the dangers to the world.

Here are two quotations from PM Netanyahu sent out by his media staff:

Press conference:

"At the welcoming ceremony at Ben Gurion Airport, you said that it is better to be right and in the minority, than to be wrong with a majority. Well, I couldn’t agree with you more. The deal that is being put on the table in Geneva is not a good deal. I believe it’s a bad deal and a dangerous one. I applaud the fact that you, personally, have taken a stance to make it tougher and firmer, but I‘m concerned, gravely concerned that this deal will go through and in one stroke of the pen it will reduce the sanctions on Iran, sanctions that took years to put in place. And in return for this Iran gives practically nothing...

"It’s clear that this agreement is good only for Iran and that it’s really bad for the rest of the world. Iran’s dream deal is the world’s nightmare. So today. I believe the choice is not between a bad deal and war.After the visit to Yad Veshem: We understand exactly when somebody says that they’re out to destroy you, we've learned in our Jewish history to take them seriously. And I think from humanity’s point of view, there should be another lesson. When somebody starts by attacking the Jews, they generally don’t end there, and the fire soon catches and burns many lands.Now in Yad Vashem, I was moved by the fact that you were so visibly moved, and you said, when you came out, you said that the experience of the Holocaust places a very special responsibility on all of us. François, I want to tell you the burden it places on me, as the Prime Minister of Israel. It is my duty to prevent anyone from credibly threatening or executing another holocaust against the Jewish people. This is my obligation, but I also believe it’s our common obligation for the sake of mankind, for the sake of our common future."

This picture puts the situation very clearly.
 Hat tip: A Soldier's Mother