As we arrive at the time of year set aside for remembering the millions of our people who were victims of the Nazi monsters who ruled Germany during the 30’s, 40’s, and early 50’s years of the 20th Century, we once again marvel at how the “civilized” people of Europe accepted, permitted, and condoned these crimes with little or no protest. It is a testament to the strength of the anti-Semitic belief system that was the rule at the time, and which we see recurring in Europe from time to time again today. It is true that some restitution has been made to those who were incarcerated wrongly, made to perform slave labor in German factories, or whose families art and antiquity collections were stolen by their captors. What no one can make restitution for are the six million lives taken, or the humiliation heaped upon the Jews of Europe at that time when laws were passed permitting this dehumanization and persecution to occur. We can only remember, and make sure that mankind remembers what happened, and that we will never forget what was done to our people. As a meshpokha, all of us were there! We went through the selection at the camp railhead and went either to death or slavery together!

That the Jewish people survived and flourish today in the State of Israel is the ultimate tribute to the strength of our belief in the covenant the Master on the Universe made with our people and with our ancestor Abraham. Our strength is in the system of ethics, traditions, and beliefs embodied in the Torah and Talmud, and which is the basis for our sense of peoplehood. Being a Jew is more than a matter of the family to which one was born, or the religious instruction received. It is a sense of belonging to a tradition steeped in history dating back over 5,000 years. Through these years many attempts have been made to make us less than we were. In Babylon, Persia, in Middle Europe, in Roman times, and the Ottoman Empire’s glory days, we persevered. In the early years of Christianity, and of the reform that followed, our people kept their faith. When Spain’s Jews, and those of Portugal, and England were expelled, and the Inquisition burned those who had converted as heretics and “conversos,” many continued to practice Judaism secretly. Through years of pogroms by the Cossacks in Russia the Shtetl Jews endured.

We remember and always will, and at our Yom HaShoah observances we remember the names of those taken away from us only because they were Jews. Many of them were children, not even old enough to understand what was being done or why. As if there was an answer to the question of why? They were different. And in that difference there was a reason for fear; fear of the unknown.
In the name of religion many fail to accept that there are many ways to reach for an understanding of our lives and how to live them in harmony with the rest of mankind.

The loss of those who died in the Holocaust, and all their generations that would have been is one we cannot ever measure. The books never written, songs never composed, plays never performed are a loss beyond our human comprehension to understand. We can only mourn these losses.

We must each year, particularly as the number of survivors continues to diminish, remind each other and everyone we know, of what happened and that those who fail to learn from history may be fated to repeat its lessons.