I Want to Remember Them: Yom HaShoah 2020

This reflection written for the University of Saint Thomas Campus Ministry Newsletter

Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, begins Monday April 20 and continues through sundown Tuesday April 21, 2020. At a time when traditionally we would come together as a community to honor our local survivors and remember those who perished, we will gather virtually to commemorate Yom HaShoah and mark the 75th anniversary of liberation and the end of the Holocaust.

Please join together on Tuesday April 21st at 6:00pm for the reading of names and at 7:00pm for a commemorative service led by Rabbi Kravitz, Rabbi Weininger, and Hazzan Dulkin from Adath Jeshrun Congregation. Marty Chester, JCRC board president will share opening remarks.

To register for the program, please go here.  

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As I’ve traveled through Passover, into Counting the Omer, and toward Sinai and celebrating Shavuot this year, I’ve been reflecting on our ancestors. My ancestors. Because I am Jewish, like any Jewish person, (including Jews who have converted to Judaism - a conversation for another time), I can track my ancestry back to Abraham and Sarah. I’ve shared stories with our ancient family at length at our Passover seders. I’ve wrestled over ideas with my distant cousins of the Talmudic era.  Through the centuries my ancestors and I have traveled together on this journey toward the freedom to be our whole Jewish selves. 

In my specific family, though, there are significant gaps. I know my great grandparents left Europe because of pogroms, but they passed down little information about the family they left behind or family who escaped persecution and death for somewhere other than the United States. A generation later, there is another gap. A bigger gap. A black hole of a gap. 

Take Lithuania. From as early as the 15th century, Lithuania was a vibrant center of Yiddish language, literature, and culture. Of life. The 160,000 or so Jewish people in Lithuania made up about 7% of the total population. Often called, “The Jerusalem of the North” by the Jewish community of that era, Vilnius was the center of this center with about 100,000 of those Jews living in the city. Think of tired mothers singing lullabies to their round-faced infants. Think of 8 and 10 year old siblings laughing at their uncles’ folktales in the kitchen. Think of the cacophony of study halls in which pairs of students are wrestling together over the big ideas and the minutia of Hebrew and Aramaic texts. 

 In 1941 Germany invaded Lithuania and with the help of the local non-Jewish population the Nazis began mass killings of Jews. Survivors were forced into ghettos. Of the more than 57,000 Jews forced into the Vilnius ghetto fewer than 2,000 survived. Approximately 95% of Lithuania’s Jewish citizens were murdered in the Shoah. The Holocaust. Erased. And with them their lullabies, their stories, their humor, their theater, their history, and their descendants. 

 Many decades later, on September 23, 2018, Pope Francis stopped to pray near the ghetto in Vilnius.

 “Seventy-five years ago, this nation witnessed the final destruction of the Vilnius Ghetto; this was the climax of the killing of thousands of Jews that had started two years earlier. . . . Let us think back on those times, and ask the Lord to give us the gift of discernment to detect in time any recrudescence of that pernicious attitude, any whiff of it that can taint the heart of generations that did not experience those times and can sometimes be taken in by such siren songs.

. . . . if we could allow the Gospel of Jesus Christ to reach the depths of our lives, then the “globalization of solidarity” would be a reality. “In our world, especially in some countries, different forms of war and conflict are re-emerging, yet we Christians remain steadfast in our intention to respect others, to heal wounds, to build bridges, to strengthen relationships and to “bear one another’s burdens” (Gal 6:2)” (Evangelii Gaudium, 67).”

I appreciate his words. I appreciate that the Catholic Church’s Catholic Teaching on the Shoah: Implementing the Holy Sees We Remember is a clear call to action.

I appreciate them. But they are not for me.

What is for me is to think about the approximately 152,000 of the 160,000 Jews of Lithuania. 65,459 of the 185,026 Jews of Austria. 260,000 of the 354,000 of Czechoslovakia. 102,000 of the 140,000 Jews of the Netherlands.  2.7-3 million of the 3.3 million Jews of Poland. And Italy. And Greece. And Latvia. And Norway. And Romania. And on and on and on. And with them their lullabies, their stories, their humor, their history, and their descendants.

The rest of the year the shadow of the Holocaust informs Jewish life in ways both obvious and so subtle you’d miss it if you didn’t know where to look. Whatever individual conclusions people come to, our history informs the ways we vote, where and how we volunteer, whether or not we believe in God, the dynamics within our families, the structures of our synagogue communities, the security systems we have in our buildings, what it means to us to be Jewish, the ways we think about and work for justice, our relationship with Israel . . . and Palestine. Everything. It is inescapable.

On Yom HaShoah, we remember. 

Had the Holocaust never happened, research indicates there could be between 27 and 32 million Jewish people in the world today. In 1939 the Jewish population of the world was about 16.6 million. 6 million died or were murdered in the Holocaust. Recent estimates hope that we may again be over 16 million in 2050.

I don’t always like everyone in it, but I love my family. I wouldn’t have seen eye-to-eye with all of the 11-16 million of our family members who might have been, but I wish I could have shared the world with them.

The message of Yom HaShoah is remember so we – we Jewish folks – never forget. Remember to hold our history and our collective trauma gently and honestly, and remember to work until “never again” includes everyone. The message is remember so no one else ever forgets and help others commit to a world without genocide. God willing without anti-Semitism, too. 

Today, in this moment, I just want to remember. 

I want to remember the voices of the people we will never hear.

I want to remember . . . them.