by Robert Wilkinson
Today is the day we remember that some things must happen “Never Again.” While the UN commemorates January 27 as “International Holocaust Day,” Israel has celebrated "Holocaust Remembrance Day" in April or May since 1951. This year it falls on April 28.
This observation of Yom Hashoah, also known as Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorates the lives and heroism of Jewish people who died in the Holocaust between 1933 and 1945. Because it is based in the Jewish calendar, the day changes each year, and this year it’s April 27. Next year it will be April 18.
From Wikipedia:
Yom HaShoah, known in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust as a result of the actions carried out by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and for the Jewish resistance in that period. In Israel, it is a national memorial day. The first official commemorations took place in 1951, and the observance of the day was anchored in a law passed by the Knesset in 1959. It is held on the 27th of Nisan (April/May), unless the 27th would be adjacent to the Jewish Sabbath, in which case the date is shifted by a day.The first Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel took place on 28 December 1949, following a decision … that an annual memorial should take place on the Tenth of Tevet, a traditional day of mourning and fasting in the Hebrew calendar. The day was marked by the burial in a Jerusalem cemetery of ashes and bones of thousands of Jews brought from the Flossenbürg concentration camp …. The following year, in December 1950, the Rabbinate, organizations of former European Jewish communities and the Israel Defense Forces held memorial ceremonies around the country; they mostly involved funerals, in which objects such as desecrated Torah scrolls and the bones and ashes of the dead brought from Europe were interred.
In 1951, the Knesset began deliberations to choose a date for Holocaust Remembrance Day. On 12 April 1951, after also considering as possibilities the Tenth of Tevet, the 14th of Nisan, which is the day before Passover and the day on which the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943) had begun, and September 1, the date on which the Second World War had begun, the Knesset passed a resolution establishing the 27 Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, a week after Passover, and eight days before Israel Independence Day as the annual Holocaust and Ghetto Uprising Remembrance Day.
On 3 May 1951, the first officially organized Holocaust Remembrance Day event was held at the Chamber of the Holocaust on Mount Zion; the Israel Postal Service issued a special commemorative envelope, and a bronze statue of Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, was unveiled at Yad Mordechai, a kibbutz named for him. From the following year, the lighting of six beacons in memory of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis became a standard feature of the official commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day.
On 8 April 1959, the Knesset officially established the day when it passed the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day Law with the purpose of instituting an annual “commemoration of the disaster which the Nazis and their collaborators brought upon the Jewish people and the acts of heroism and revolt performed.”
As I offered in January, while genocide is still an ugly part of the human heritage of fear against “the other,” in the coming era we will look back at this sort of barbaric mass murder as a symptom of the toxicity of the human past when our bodies, feelings, and minds refused to listen to our Souls even though we knew better. While there is still widespread destruction of various living creatures on our fragile Earth, and we seem to be on the edge of another mass extinction of countless species on our planet, there are millions of us who will never approve of, nor participate in, the vile stench of genocide.
Ultimately we are one race: the human race. We have no business exterminating one another, nor exterminating the many beautiful creatures that we’re supposed to coexist with in peaceful and productive ways. Genocidal thinking has no place on our Earth.
When enough realize that what hurts one hurts us all, we shall make war no more. We shall have our differences, but will never tolerate mass murder as a result of a fearful delusion. Never again should millions suffer because of the delusion that genocide is anything but an abomination. Never again!
© Copyright 2022 Robert Wilkinson
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