Preacherman
Member
To all our Jewish members, I respectfully and prayerfully wish you a holy Yom HaShoah. May the world never forget!
In commemoration, the Wall Street Journal (http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006658) published this article. I've highlighted in bold one of the most remarkable Holocaust stories I've ever read.
Stories of Survival
Told on a Jewish holy day like no other.
BY SETH M. SIEGEL
Friday, May 6, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. It is a Jewish holy day unlike any other, and not only because of its relatively recent creation.
The day of commemoration was set by Israel's Parliament in 1951 after an intense debate--among religious groups, Zionist organizations and survivors--over its proper date on the Hebrew calendar. Clearly there was no one day on which the Holocaust "happened"; it began, arguably, in November 1938 and continued until the end of the war in Europe in April 1945. The Israeli Parliament finally decided Yom HaShoah would fall a few days after the end of Passover, keeping it within the Hebrew month of the most famous anti-Nazi Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto and yet pushing this painful memorial past the days of joy celebrating the ancient exodus from Egypt.
Now, 60 years after the end of World War II, a new (if lesser) tension fills Jewish communities in connection with Yom HaShoah: How to celebrate it and keep it relevant?
Judaism is famous for its precise dictates of rite and ritual. Observant Jews know what is expected of them religiously from the time they rise until the time they go to sleep. By contrast, Yom HaShoah comes with no specific prayers, no obligation to fast. As to relevance, some--particularly in the more liberal Reform congregations and on college campuses--would strip Yom HaShoah of its uniquely Jewish dimension and put a universal cast on it, equating the Holocaust with other acts of genocide, such as Rwanda or Darfur.
"Many Reform congregations have conflated other peoples' tragedies with a universalizing of the Jewish message of Yom HaShoah," says Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College, the Reform movement's rabbinical seminary. "Without minimizing any other group's pain here, Yom HaShoah offers an appropriate moment to look inward and to understand the uniquely Jewish reality of the Holocaust." Its victims were singled out, after all, for the sole reason that they were Jews.
Still, how to commemorate Yom HaShoah? In Israel, it is a melancholy day, marked by two minutes of wailing sirens during which the country comes to a silent standstill. In America, all three main denominations have evening synagogue services of some kind, in which candles are lit, prayers for the dead are recited, somber readings and liturgical poetry are offered and a tiny percentage of the names of the six million murdered Jews are read. (Ultra-Orthodox Jews refuse to acknowledge Yom HaShoah: They believe that communal mourning is subsumed in another day of commemoration, Tisha B'Av.)
From its earliest observance, Yom HaShoah focused in part on the hopeful and heroic--the glimmers of light in the otherwise unremitting darkness of those years. "Who was a hero?" asks Dr. Jacob J. Schacter, dean of the (Orthodox) Rabbi Soloveitchik Institute in Boston. "Ghetto fighters, partisans, resisters of any kind, even those who continued to live a moral life in the face of such evil."
In preparation for this year's Yom HaShoah, a Jewish school in New York discovered one such act of defiance and survival. At a recent parents' meeting at the progressive Abraham Joshua Heschel School on Manhattan's Upper West Side, two fathers of young daughters introduced themselves and learned, remarkably, that both of their fathers had been born in the same small Ukrainian town.
The Heschel parents, an American and an Israeli, realized that, since there was only a single Nazi transport from the town, both of their fathers were undoubtedly on the same train bound for an extermination camp in October 1942. The American told of his then 19-year-old father, who escaped by jumping through a plank he had dislodged from above a window in the car. His father, telling the story, always added that, before he jumped, he pushed a boy up and out through that loosened plank.
The Israeli instantly knew who the boy was, for his own father had always told of how there was an opening too high for him to reach--he was then age 11--and of how an older boy lifted him up and pushed him out. The two boys never saw each other again, but each, miraculously, survived the war by hiding in Ukrainian farms and forests. Now their children, so far in time and space from these events, came to learn that their daughters are in the same class.
In earlier years, the school's Yom HaShoah memorials have featured Heschel grandparents, including leaders of anti-Nazi partisan groups and survivors who described life in the ghettos. Those presentations were extraordinary, but perhaps none was equal to this story of entwined generations--and the hope it offers.
In commemoration, the Wall Street Journal (http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006658) published this article. I've highlighted in bold one of the most remarkable Holocaust stories I've ever read.
Stories of Survival
Told on a Jewish holy day like no other.
BY SETH M. SIEGEL
Friday, May 6, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. It is a Jewish holy day unlike any other, and not only because of its relatively recent creation.
The day of commemoration was set by Israel's Parliament in 1951 after an intense debate--among religious groups, Zionist organizations and survivors--over its proper date on the Hebrew calendar. Clearly there was no one day on which the Holocaust "happened"; it began, arguably, in November 1938 and continued until the end of the war in Europe in April 1945. The Israeli Parliament finally decided Yom HaShoah would fall a few days after the end of Passover, keeping it within the Hebrew month of the most famous anti-Nazi Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto and yet pushing this painful memorial past the days of joy celebrating the ancient exodus from Egypt.
Now, 60 years after the end of World War II, a new (if lesser) tension fills Jewish communities in connection with Yom HaShoah: How to celebrate it and keep it relevant?
Judaism is famous for its precise dictates of rite and ritual. Observant Jews know what is expected of them religiously from the time they rise until the time they go to sleep. By contrast, Yom HaShoah comes with no specific prayers, no obligation to fast. As to relevance, some--particularly in the more liberal Reform congregations and on college campuses--would strip Yom HaShoah of its uniquely Jewish dimension and put a universal cast on it, equating the Holocaust with other acts of genocide, such as Rwanda or Darfur.
"Many Reform congregations have conflated other peoples' tragedies with a universalizing of the Jewish message of Yom HaShoah," says Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College, the Reform movement's rabbinical seminary. "Without minimizing any other group's pain here, Yom HaShoah offers an appropriate moment to look inward and to understand the uniquely Jewish reality of the Holocaust." Its victims were singled out, after all, for the sole reason that they were Jews.
Still, how to commemorate Yom HaShoah? In Israel, it is a melancholy day, marked by two minutes of wailing sirens during which the country comes to a silent standstill. In America, all three main denominations have evening synagogue services of some kind, in which candles are lit, prayers for the dead are recited, somber readings and liturgical poetry are offered and a tiny percentage of the names of the six million murdered Jews are read. (Ultra-Orthodox Jews refuse to acknowledge Yom HaShoah: They believe that communal mourning is subsumed in another day of commemoration, Tisha B'Av.)
From its earliest observance, Yom HaShoah focused in part on the hopeful and heroic--the glimmers of light in the otherwise unremitting darkness of those years. "Who was a hero?" asks Dr. Jacob J. Schacter, dean of the (Orthodox) Rabbi Soloveitchik Institute in Boston. "Ghetto fighters, partisans, resisters of any kind, even those who continued to live a moral life in the face of such evil."
In preparation for this year's Yom HaShoah, a Jewish school in New York discovered one such act of defiance and survival. At a recent parents' meeting at the progressive Abraham Joshua Heschel School on Manhattan's Upper West Side, two fathers of young daughters introduced themselves and learned, remarkably, that both of their fathers had been born in the same small Ukrainian town.
The Heschel parents, an American and an Israeli, realized that, since there was only a single Nazi transport from the town, both of their fathers were undoubtedly on the same train bound for an extermination camp in October 1942. The American told of his then 19-year-old father, who escaped by jumping through a plank he had dislodged from above a window in the car. His father, telling the story, always added that, before he jumped, he pushed a boy up and out through that loosened plank.
The Israeli instantly knew who the boy was, for his own father had always told of how there was an opening too high for him to reach--he was then age 11--and of how an older boy lifted him up and pushed him out. The two boys never saw each other again, but each, miraculously, survived the war by hiding in Ukrainian farms and forests. Now their children, so far in time and space from these events, came to learn that their daughters are in the same class.
In earlier years, the school's Yom HaShoah memorials have featured Heschel grandparents, including leaders of anti-Nazi partisan groups and survivors who described life in the ghettos. Those presentations were extraordinary, but perhaps none was equal to this story of entwined generations--and the hope it offers.
It justs makes me more committed to our Civil Rights...the 2A being the most important. 
The Japanese take it to an extreme in their history books as they blame the U.S. for the attack on Pearl Harbor,and call the Rape of Nanking, where an entire city was put to the bayonet, an "incident". 