Today is Yom Hashoah, the holiday on which we remember the death of the six million Jews lost in the Holocaust.
Note the term "remember," as it is common to view the Holocaust not from the standpoint of Jewish history, but rather Jewish memory. We "remember" when our cities were ransacked and our communities deported to the killing centers in the East. We "remember" when we were packed into cattle cars like sardines, when we were stripped naked and deprived of our humanity.
And we remember seeing American bombers flying overhead at the war's end. We remember hiding in the sewers as the American forces dealt the Germans their final blow. We remember climbing out of the sewers later in the day and thinking 'The Nazis have been conquered, but where to now'? With no home, no country and often no family members left, our lives were as much as ever marked by hopelessness and uncertainty. Yet we remember when David Ben-Gurion declared the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, proclaiming that never again would any Jew have no place to turn to. Today, as rampant anti-semitism pervades Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, his words ring in our ears.
During my most recent visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, I felt a complex set of emotions. I was as moved as ever by the horrifying photographs and the survivor's stories. Still, I wondered if it was really necessary for me to be there. Have I not seen enough images of the Holocaust to stay with me for life? Isn't the fact that six million Jews died enough to ensure that the pain will always be with me - had we lost twice as many, would I still need to refresh my memory now and then?
I told the friends I was with that the emotions and tears they released at the moment must not be a once a year event - that our responsibility to the six million does not come and go. I also told them that when I refer to having family killed in the Holocaust, people might ask me who it was I lost, an aunt? a cousin? But the exact number of relatives I lost is not the issue - the Holocaust killed one third of all Jews, one third of my family.
The success of "Schindler's List" is excellent, but who knows if this will reach those Americans, 22 percent by a 1992 poll, that doubt the Holocaust happened. It is a fool's paradise to think that the job is over. Even of those who know about it, how many know about America's own war guilt?
How many know that a 1939 poll showed that 53 percent of Americans thought that Jews were "different" and should not be allowed into the U.S.? How many know that Jewish refugees were sent back before, during and after the war? How many know that the War Department rejected a proposal to bomb the gas chambers at Auschwitz, where American bombers were flying right overhead? How many know that hundreds of thousands of Jews might have escaped to Palestine had the British not sold out completely to the Arabs, a move tacitly accepted by Roosevelt? How many Jews know that The New York Times, owned by self-hating Jews, bares unpardonable guilt for intentionally ignoring and burying reports about the mass murder of Jews?
Esteemed civil-rights attorney Alan Dershowitz responds with this: "A world that closed its doors to Jews who sought escape from Hitler's ovens lacks the moral standing to complain about Israel's giving preference to Jews."
Equally troubling is the perception that anti-semitism is a figment of the past - that after the Holocaust humanity learned its lesson. A Jewish organization recently found that 23 percent of Americans were what it characterized as "very anti-semitic." Earlier this year, when Jewish organizations made a concerted effort to isolate one hateful group, Louis Farrakhan's viciously anti-semitic Nation of Islam, we received scorn in some circles for being "self-important" and "insensitive to the black community" for asking black leaders to denounce him.
Farrakhan and his deputies have blamed the AIDS epidemic on Jewish doctors for conspiring to inject the AIDS virus into blacks, alleged that "the Zionists made a deal with Adolph Hitler," demonstrated Holocaust revisionism in their newspaper, The Final Call, and suggested that Judaism "has survived when it should have disappeared." Jews have been crying and screaming about this ferocious anti-semitism for decades, but what happened? The Congressional Black Caucus, a group of 20-plus black members of the House led by Kwesi Mfume (D-MD), signed a "covenant" with the Nation of Islam in 1993. A covenant! Black unity through Holocaust revisionism! Black unity through blaming Jews for infecting black babies with AIDS! Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. It took a full page advertisement in The New York Times by a Jewish organization exposing this virulent anti-semitism for the Black Caucus to disavow the "covenant."
Still, the NAACP has made the sickening move of inviting Farrakhan to its annual convention, the same Farrakhan who has received millions of dollars from Libyan terrorist Muammar Khaddafi and even the White Aryan Resistance! If a Jew was to state publicly that black people should have been erased from the earth or that slavery was a hoax, would this person be invited to sign a "covenant" with a Congressional delegation, to address the country's leading Jewish organization? Would blacks have the right to ask all responsible Jews and Americans to condemn this nonsense? Or is Farrakhan justified in siding with the Arab countries, who, according to The New York Times, have banned "Schindler's List" from their nations.
Is the Holocaust nothing more than Zionist propaganda or an excuse for orchestrating a world conspiracy of some kind? Nothing could be more antithetical to the beliefs of Martin Luther King, Jr., a close friend of the Jewish people who used the words "an oasis of brotherhood and democracy" to describe Israel, where a 10,000 tree memorial forest grows in his honor. The majority of the black community cannot be blamed for anti-semitism, but it is unacceptable there as elsewhere.
My allegiance is not to being "P.C." - rather, I have a responsiblity to stand up for what I believe in because of the two loyalties to which I so strongly tie my identity. As an American, I firmly believe in upholding civic duty to help my country solve its problems. I owe that to the country which has given me the chance to be proud of who I am. As a Jew, I must support the Zionist ideal - that the Jewish people deserve a place on this earth - and confront anti-semitism. I owe that to the six million.
