You all know I love to start these episodes with a story. Usually something comical, or self-deprecating, or slightly absurd. Something that reveals some facet of my personality: my love of carbs, my hatred of slash discomfort with board games, my family’s totally normal and healthy obsession with sports. Tiny reminders that I have an identity beyond my job.
But the story I’m about to tell you bucks all of that.
It’s absurd, but it isn’t comical.
And it’s a little peek into who I am, who I’m married to – and a demonstration of the fact that the boundaries between my job and my identity, my core self, can be porous. Sometimes it’s hard to know where Noam-the-person ends and Noam-the-educator begins. This is one of those times.
Last year, my wife Raizie barged into my office. I have to tell you a story, she said. You need to hear this.
Raizie was a few days out from a mission trip to Israel. She had just called our health insurance company and let them know she’d be traveling abroad. The woman on the other end of the phone asked where she was going. A few years ago, that question might not have been fraught. Today, it’s a gamble. But Raizie told the truth. She was bracing for some acerbic comment at worst. Instead, she got an unexpected outpouring of sympathy.
I’m just so sad about Israel, the health insurance agent said. My son is in high school and he just told me that he wants Palestine to be free from the river to the sea. He meant free from Jews.
Let me remind you: this was a routine call to our health insurance company. Raizie wasn’t expecting a hot-button political conversation. But the woman wasn’t done. She told Raizie that she had asked her son what do you know about the history of the Jews? Do you know they come from Israel? Do you know that just 80 years ago, one third of the world’s Jews were wiped out? What did you learn about the Holocaust in school?
And her son responded: Huh? Because he’d never heard of the Holocaust.
I’ll say that again: HE DIDN’T KNOW ANY OF THIS.
At this point, by the way, Raizie was captivated. Her administrative errand had turned into something much, much bigger.
The health insurance agent was enraged. There aren’t a whole lot of Jews where she lives. But that, she said, was no excuse. So she called up the school principal and let him have it.
How dare my son be left ignorant of one of the most systemized genocide in the history of the world? How can he learn about WWII yet know nothing about the mechanized slaughter of one in three of the world’s Jews? How dare you, she finished her tirade to the principal. Meaning: how dare you keep these kids ignorant? How dare you erase this from the curriculum?
But the principal was unfazed by her anger.
Ma’am, he told her, we don’t teach the Holocaust because… – and this is the insane part, this is the part that shocked her, and Raizie, and me – historians dispute whether the Holocaust actually happened. We teach verified history, not historical disputes.”
Raizie told me all this frantically. Can you believe it, her tone implied. What is this messed-up crazy timeline we’re living in?! My wife, after all, is a grandchild of survivors.
But I said nothing. I was too busy processing. And I guess I was stunned. And Raizie, feeling urgent and frantic and beyond herself, yelled – not at me, but to me, in anguish and hope: Do something about it.
I’ve been turning this story around in my head ever since.
On one level, it’s unfathomable to me that anyone in this country doesn’t know.
Especially when I think back to my own childhood, as a Jewish kid in the Baltimore suburbs.
Nearly everyone I know has a Holocaust story: an aging relative who fled who was secreted away by kind neighbors or nuns, who fled to the forests to join the Resistance, surviving on berries and bark and defiance. And then there are the ones who were sent into the inferno of Auschwitz or Majdanek or Sobibor, and somehow emerged alive. My elementary school teacher from Rambam, Morah Yaffa Munk, was a survivor herself. As an 8 year old, I remember feeling like she was from another time, another world. In a way, she was. And yet, she was also just my friend’s grandma, a normal bubbe like anyone else’s.
These were the contradictions we lived with as Jewish kids.
The Holocaust was right there, a shadow none of us could shake, and yet, at the same time… we were so normal and suburban. We watched cartoons and played sports and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut off… and we knew, in detail, how evil human beings can be to one another. We knew that just a few decades before we were born, someone had succeeded in slaughtering a third of us. We knew the fact that we were here at all was, in some ways, a miracle.
Those are heavy things for 8-year-olds to know.
We didn’t have the language, as kids, to describe the nightmares that seemed a rite of passage among people of my generation. Today, we’d call it inherited trauma, or intergenerational trauma. We would probably talk about epigenetics.
But back then, we knew it as an occasional bad dream about uniformed men in shiny boots. Or of hiding in cramped rooms, of needing to stay very, very quiet. Of being told, pack your bag, you’re leaving home in an hour. We’d even talk about it sometimes, casually, like this was a normal conversation to have: what would you bring with you? Or, really really dark questions like, which of us would have the skill sets to survive?
But as we got older, under every casually macabre conversation, every joke we cracked to offset the horror, ran a hidden current of defiance. If the Holocaust was the darkness gathering in the corners, then we were the lights that would banish it. Every Shabbat, every holiday. Every Bar or Bat Mitzvah, wedding, birth, bris. Every trip to Israel, word of Torah, Nobel Prize. Every moment felt like an act of defiance. Laughing in the face of death.
Except, of course, when we aren’t laughing at all. When we put aside the gallows humor for a day and just remember. A day when we let the pain in. Let the grief sit with us. A day when we give history our full attention.
On the Gregorian calendar, that day usually falls sometime in April. In the Jewish calendar, it’s the 27th of the Hebrew month of Nisan, five days after the end of Passover. In Hebrew, we call it Yom HaShoah vehaGevurah, literally, “The Day of the Holocaust and the Heroism,” though it’s usually shortened to just Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Day. It’s got an even bulkier title In English: “Holocaust and Ghetto Uprising Remembrance Day – a day of perpetual remembrance for the House of Israel.” (For the record, I’ve never heard anyone refer to it by its full English name. Way too many syllables.)
I’ve been observing Yom HaShoah my whole life.
In the Diaspora, the rituals are more or less the same: the lighting of six candles, one for each of the six million Jewish victims. The prayers for the dead: Kaddish and Kel Maleh Rachamim. A talk from a Holocaust survivor, or a Holocaust movie, or a visit to a museum. Some communities wear pins that read simply, zachor: the Hebrew word for remember! It’s an imperative. A command.
But in Israel, there’s another ritual of remembering.
On the 27th of Nisan, at precisely 10 in the morning, an air raid siren sounds throughout the country. It’s alarming if you aren’t used to it: that looping, plaintive whine. It’s alarming even if you are. And it’s also astonishing. A sudden silence descends on a country that is rarely quiet or still. Cars pull over on the road. In cafes and supermarkets, in libraries and auditoriums, at the dog park and on the beach, everyone stops what they’re doing and just – stands.
Two minutes of somber reflection. Two minutes of quiet. Heads bowed. The only sound is the siren and the air, the rustling of tree leaves, a sniffle, a dog barking at the siren – the white noise of everyday life, without a single word.
And then it ends. People get back in their cars and drive away. Baristas finish making lattes. Librarians check out books. Teachers resume their lessons. Life goes on.
And I took all of this for granted… until I didn’t. Until I started to wonder how Yom HaShoah veh haGevurah even came to be.
Judaism has no shortage of solemn days. Remembrance is knit into our religion, into the rhythm of our calendar. We fast to commemorate ancient tragedies: the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem; the breaching of Jerusalem’s walls; the high-profile assassination of an ancient Jewish governor by another Jew.
And then there’s the most important fast of all: the 9th of Av, 25 hours without food or water in the dog days of summer, to commemorate the destruction of both Holy Temples, first by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E, then by the Romans 500 years later, in the year 70.
I’m not giving you those dates because I’m nitpicky and pedantic, although, of course, I am often both of those things. I’m including those dates to point out something really important about Judaism and Jews. We’ve been commemorating historical catastrophes for 2000 years. Remembering is baked into our peoplehood. In instituting this date of mourning, our ancient rabbis rolled the commemoration of every Jewish tragedy into a single day. We use Tisha B’av to remember the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Crusades, the pogroms. And now, October 7th. The Talmud makes it clear, “huchpilu bo kol hatzarot,” We subsume the major tragedies under one day.
And when you think about it, that makes sense.
The empires that destroyed the Temples also murdered many thousands of Jews, hauling many more into captivity and exile. So Tisha B’av isn’t just about the destruction of a building, no matter how sacred. It also commemorates the loss of a homeland, of autonomy and self-rule. It is the story of empires trying to sever our roots.
Historically, most of our tragedies followed from there. Would the Spanish Inquisition have happened if we had been governing ourselves in our ancient homeland? How about the endless pogroms killing tens of thousands that punctuated Jewish life in exile? What about the Holocaust?
But the Holocaust is a contemporary tragedy, and we practice an ancient religion.
So how exactly did Yom HaShoah veh haGevurah come about, with its solemn rituals of remembrance? Or, to word it differently: What was the process by which the State of Israel began to reckon with the aftermath of genocide?
The Jews who would later become Israelis began commemorating the Holocaust almost as soon as it ended. Religious communities adopted an existing fast day, the 10th of Tevet, in the dregs of winter, as a grim anniversary of sorts – and we’ll get back to that later. But secular communities chose the 27th of Nisan, right after Passover, and Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset made it official in 1951.
Why then? For that matter, why not January 27th, the day the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, which the rest of the world has adopted as International Holocaust Remembrance Day? And what’s with the name that the Knesset chose? Why Holocaust and Heroism Day?
The answer to all of these questions lies in the story of two Jewish heroes, both named Mordechai.
One died before his 25th birthday, in a cramped bunker at 18 Mila Street in Warsaw. The other lived a full, if painful, life, serving in the parliaments of two countries before his death at the age of 83 in Tel Aviv. The two Mordechais never met. But both shaped the legacy of Yom HaShoah veh HaGevurah.
But to understand why, I have to tell you something that never gets easier for me to talk about. And that is the way many early Israelis viewed Holocaust survivors.
We’ve talked before about the early Zionist conception of the New Jew: a heroic pioneer, bronzed and brawny, who would muck out the swamps and plant orchards and never know the terror of a pogrom. A Jew with an iron spine, who held his ground and won, who wouldn’t have just gone quietly into the trains and crematoria. Who would have resisted.
In fact, for some early thinkers, the New Jew wouldn’t be a Jew at all. As the early Zionist writer Micha Yosef Berdichevsky put it: We will either be the last Jews or the first Hebrews.
The 140,000 survivors who poured into Israel in the years after the Holocaust, scarred and skeletal, were an embarrassing reminder that the New Jew was little more than a fantasy. An airbrushed version of the Jew, minus all the Diaspora baggage.
Instead of pity or compassion, survivors aroused a mingled shame and disdain. Their tattoos were grotesque. Their stories were worse. No one wanted to hear them. And so they kept their testimony locked behind their lips. They didn’t speak about what they suffered. And for a time, Israelis took comfort in this silence. As long as everyone was quiet, Israelis could pretend that they, brawny Hebrews that they were, would have been stronger or smarter or more defiant. That they would have survived.
Maybe you’re horrified by this: this cruel and casual dismissal of Holocaust survivors. On paper, it is horrifying. But the reality is more complicated.
Remember, in the first year since its founding, Israel had fought its War of Independence, which they called The War of Liberation. They’d lost one percent of the population to five invading armies and a handful of irregular militias. They knew the stakes: win, or die. And they had won. They had won.
Holocaust survivors were an inconvenient, and painful, reminder of what happens to a Jew who doesn’t win. A reminder that sometimes, there is no winning. The Nazis had mechanized death, and there was no outsmarting the machine. Escape was a matter of luck. The crematoria didn’t distinguish between a Jew who went quietly and a Jew who raised hell. It didn’t matter, in the end, how or how much someone resisted. The ovens were built for us all.
To admit that is to admit you are vulnerable. That your fate is not in your hands. But it would take at least a decade for Israelis to confront this fact. To recognize that the line between the muscular New Jew and the skeletal survivor was much, much thinner than anyone wanted to believe.
Few Israelis wanted to confront the reality of the Holocaust. Everyday acts of resistance weren’t glamorous. No one wanted to think about the bravery it took to smuggle food into the ghetto, because no Israeli wanted to think much about the ghettos. Thinking about it meant admitting that the ghetto was built for you, too. It meant admitting that if you had been there, you probably wouldn’t have survived.
So no one wanted to honor the defiance it took to educate the next generation, or to start an archive documenting ghetto life, or to simply keep breathing.
Because the point of a Jewish state was to break free of subjugation. And if Israelis admitted that simply staying alive for another day was a form of resistance, they’d be plunged back into the world they’d worked so hard to remake. A world in which a Jewish life didn’t matter to anyone. A world that allowed six million Jews to be burned to ash. They refused to go back to a world that rewarded this quiet, heroic resistance with utter indifference.
But these people? They were Israelis now. They spoke the language of power, of military might. They gravitated towards Holocaust stories that featured a specific kind of power, a narrow brand of resistance that fit with their own narratives about themselves. And the most famous, appealing, historically resonant of these stories was the tragic tale of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, led by our first Mordechai, a young, charismatic hero named Mordechai Anielewicz. He is the reason we commemorate Yom HaShoah veh HaGevurah on the 27th of Nisan, in springtime, right after Passover.
Let’s take a break, and I’ll tell you all about him when I get back.
Mordechai Anielewicz was born in Poland in 1919, to a working-class Jewish family. As a teen, he joined Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth group that had attracted future Israeli luminaries like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. The movement was deeply concerned with Jewish dignity, which meant, in part, Jewish self-defense. Betar’s central thesis: Jews deserved self-rule in their ancestral homeland, and they would fight for it if necessary.
But Mordechai never got to see his ancestral homeland. He was 20 when the Nazis invaded Poland. He was arrested at the Romanian border, trying to open an escape route towards Palestine. After spending time in a Soviet jail, he returned to Warsaw, less than a year before the Nazis began building the largest ghetto in Europe.
In October of 1940, the Nazis shunted every Jew in Warsaw and the surrounding areas into the ghetto, which they sealed off from the outside world. 450,000 people, squeezed into a little over 1 mile. Put differently, more than 30% of the city’s population, crammed into less than 3% of the city’s landmass. A year later, the Nazis announced that any Jew caught outside the ghetto without valid papers would be shot on sight.
It was a miserable place, without adequate food, sanitation, or infrastructure. Its residents were crowded 6 or 7 to a single room, subsisting on 200 calories a day. They faced arbitrary arrest, detention, and forced labor, as well as starvation and disease. Over the course of two years, more than 80,000 Jews died there, and that was before mass deportations to the extermination camp at Treblinka in 1942.
Anielewicz quickly established himself as a leader of the ghetto’s resistance. He established a newspaper called Neged HaZerem, which means “Countercurrent.” At first, he confined his resistance to cultural activities, to sneaking out of the ghetto to coordinate anti-Nazi resistance movements in other cities. It was during one of these covert visits in summer of 1942 that the Nazis deported 265,000 Jews from the ghetto to Treblinka. (Nerd corner alert: in what seems like a grisly coincidence, the deportations began on the eve of Tisha B’Av, the Jewish day of mourning. Though, of course, for many people, this isn’t a coincidence at all, but proof of a divine hand at work.)
Instead of trying to flee and save himself, Mordechai rushed back to the ghetto to convince its leaders that it was time to fight back. Community leaders, known as the Judenrat, were deeply conflicted, terrified that armed resistance would only make things worse.
But Mordechai wasn’t the only one raring to fight. Most of the people deported – or murdered on the spot – were parents, children, the elderly, the infirm. The 60,000 or so Jews who remained were mostly teenagers, newly orphaned and wracked with guilt and shame for surviving.
They knew they were probably going to die. But they refused to go down without a fight.
Mordechai was the obvious choice to lead them. And so, with a number of other young people, he organized the – oh god, I apologize in advance for how I’m about to mangle this – Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Zhi-DOV-ska Or-ga-nee-ZA-tsya Boy-O-va), or ZOB, which translates to Jewish Fighting Organization, which prepared to give the Nazis hell.
In the cramped warrens of the ghetto, they constructed bunkers. They made contact with the black market and the Polish Home Army, which managed to spare a few rifles and grenades. And they learned to make weapons, including crude explosives like Molotov cocktails.
So when the Nazis entered the ghetto in January of 1943, the ZOB was ready. A handful of young fighters – men and women alike – met the SS with rifles and grenades. For four days, the SS and the malnourished resistance fighters of the ZOB fought rough and nasty street battles. Fifty SS officers were killed in the uprising. But so were all the ZOB fighters – except for Mordechai.
Still, the revolt was, in its bleak way, a success.
The SS withdrew. The resistance had managed to fend them off and to stop a mass deportation. For a few months, the Nazis strategized. They tried to lure Jews out of the ghetto with promises of food or jobs. But the remaining Jews weren’t having it. They knew where those boxcars were going. They refused to be taken alive.
So – weak and half-starved, surviving on little more than spite – they gathered their strength and waited for the Nazis to return.
They did. And this time, they came with 2,000 soldiers, a battalion of tanks, and canisters of poison gas.
April 19th, 1943 was the eve of Passover – a holiday that celebrates Jewish liberation. It also happened to be Hitler’s birthday. The Nazis were master propagandists, acutely aware of the power of image. They chose this date for a reason.
But the 700 Jews who met them at the gates of the ghetto were ready for the fight.
Instead of crowding around a Seder table, recounting the story of the Exodus, they were gathered with guns and grenades. This year, they wouldn’t celebrate liberation. They would fight for it, knowing full well they were going to die.
When Jews talk about freedom, we’re usually not talking about death. To us, freedom is life. It’s living how you want, worshipping as you please, standing in dignity.
But in April of 1943, the fighters of the ZOB redefined liberation. This year, freedom meant choosing your death. It meant refusing to be loaded onto boxcars or pressed into forced labor. It meant dying with a gun in hand, maybe taking a Nazi or two down with you.
The initial battle was fierce. At first, the ZOB forced the Germans into retreat, killing or wounding 12 Nazis. For more than a week, they fought with such holy rage that the Nazis decided it would be easiest to simply raze the ghetto to the ground, killing as many of its inhabitants as they could.
On May 8th, 1943, Mordechai Anielewicz was in the ZOB headquarters, a bunker under 18 Mila Street, with roughly 100 other fighters. All around them, civilians were surrendering, but the ZOB held fast. They knew this was it. Hastily, Mordechai scribbled a letter to his friend and fellow fighter Yitzhak Zuckerman, which read in part:
“Peace be with you, my dear friend. Who knows whether we shall meet again? My life’s dream has now been realized: Jewish self-defense in the ghetto is now an accomplished fact.…I have been witness to the magnificent, heroic struggle of the Jewish fighters.”
Shortly afterwards, the Nazis gassed their bunker, killing Mordechai and most of his comrades. Those who didn’t die immediately took their own lives to evade capture.
Again: sometimes liberation means choosing the way you die.
And still, the ZOB limped on for another eight days. The Nazis wouldn’t declare victory over the Warsaw Ghetto until May 16th, deporting most of the remaining Jews to forced-labor and concentration camps – though some Jews miraculously evaded deportation, and continued the fight against the Nazis elsewhere.
Which means that it took nearly a month for 2000 Nazis to declare victory over 700 starving Jews. This is the same amount of time it took all of Poland to surrender to the Nazi invasion in September of 1939.
And if you begin counting in January 1943, when the ZOB first drove away the Nazis, then the Warsaw Ghetto resistance managed to hold off Nazi forces for five months.
Five months! For a force of less than 1,000 young people, weakened from years of starvation and disease and grief, to hold off an army that had captured Poland in 27 days and France in six weeks.
So of course the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising became a legend in Israel and across the Jewish world. How could it not? This was the fighting spirit. This was the New Jew.
The ZOB were the sons of King David, aiming their stones at Goliath’s head. They were the children of the Maccabees, fending off an empire with lightning attacks. They were the descendants of the Jewish forces who had fought the Romans not once but three times. They were the legendary fighters of Masada, who held out on a mountain fortress for three years after the destruction of the Second Temple, eventually killing themselves rather than be taken captive by the Romans.
And they were the inspiration for other uprisings, in other ghettos and death camps. Even before the war was over, Jewish communities in the free world began to commemorate the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
And that is why the Knesset chose the 27th of Nisan to mark Yom HaShoah veh HaGevurah. This wasn’t the day the uprising began – that was the eve of Passover, not really appropriate or practical for a national Holocaust memorial day. Instead, they picked a date sandwiched between the end of the Passover and Israeli Independence Day.
The resonance is obvious.
Most of the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters never made it to the IDF. But they fought with the same ethos: to protect the Jewish people. To resist annihilation. To build a new world in which Jewish lives mattered.
So of course Israelis don’t commemorate Yom HaShoah on January 27th, like the rest of the world. Sure, the liberation of Auschwitz is momentous and important and worthy of celebration. But it was a liberation at the hand of a foreign army. And Yom HaShoah veh HaGevurah – like Israel itself! – is dedicated to Jews who rose up to defend themselves.
Of course, where there are two Jews, there are three opinions. Not everyone was thrilled about marking Yom haShoah on the 27th of Nisan. As I mentioned earlier, some deeply religious communities had been marking Holocaust Day on the 10th of Tevet, in winter, the day the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem.
And this brings us to our second Mordechai, a deeply religious Jew himself. Rabbi Mordechai Nurock, who in 1951 was a member of Knesset representing the Religious Zionist Mizrahi party, which he co-founded in 1902.
Rabbi Nurock was born right as the modern Zionist movement was getting off the ground. By the time he was 19, he was an active Zionist, even attending the Sixth Zionist Conference in 1903. His interest in politics stretched beyond Zionism; before the Holocaust, he had served in the Latvian Parliament. In all of his spare time – that’s a joke, by the way – he was also Latvia’s Chief Rabbi.
In 1940, the Soviets annexed Latvia. As you might know from previous episodes, the USSR had a, shall we say, complicated relationship with Zionism. They deported Nurock to a reeducation camp in the east – ironically saving his life. He was in Central Asia when the Nazis invaded in the summer of 1941.
His wife and children, however, were still in Latvia. They were among the 75% of Latvian Jews murdered by the Nazis.
Rabbi Nurock was now alone. When the war ended, he was already in his 60s: a widower, a bereaved father, a survivor of Soviet prison. He had every reason to give up.
But like so many survivors, he didn’t. Instead, he moved to Israel, serving in the first five Knessets. As a politician, he was deeply involved in every piece of Holocaust-related legislation – including, of course, establishing the 27th of Nisan as Yom HaShoah veh HaGevurah. The day the legislation was adopted in April 1951, Rabbi Nurock gave a speech in the Knesset that had some of the audience in tears, linking the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to another tragedy of Jewish history. As he explained, quote: “We had to choose a date that also fits most massacres of European Jewry, and the ghetto revolt took place in Nissan. That is why the Knesset committee chose the end of Nissan when many sacred communities were killed by the Crusaders, forefathers of the Nazis.”
That could have been that. Yom HaShoah VehaGevurah, established, 27th of Nissan, April 19th. Done. But that wasn’t the end of the story.
Because even after the Knesset made it official, Israelis mostly treated Yom HaShoah veh HaGevurah like any other day. So in 1959, Rabbi Nurock and other survivors proposed additional legislation to emphasize the solemnity of the day. By the 1960s, the day had taken its final form: all places of entertainment would be closed. The national Holocaust museum, Yad VaShem, would help organize and broadcast public commemorations. And of course, for two minutes, the piercing wail of the air-raid siren would remind everyone to pause, bow their heads, and remember.
By this point, the Israeli conception of the Holocaust had matured. The trial of Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the final solution, had captivated the world. For the first time, survivors were asked to lay bare their most traumatic memories. They spoke fluidly of the horrors they had endured. And they made it clear that resistance took many, many forms. No, they and their relatives had not gone “quietly” like sheep to the slaughter. Simply standing in that courtroom, facing the man who had designed the bureaucratic machinery of death, was a form of resistance too.
But the story of Yom HaShoah veh HaGevurah doesn’t end there. Though most Israelis accepted the 27th of Nissan as the official date, many Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox (hate that word!) communities believe that Nisan, the time of our national liberation and birth as a people, is an inappropriate time to commemorate the Holocaust.
Instead, they choose to commemorate the Holocaust on Tisha B’Av, the traditional Jewish day of mourning. And they had some unlikely supporters. In 1977, Prime Minister Menachem Begin – who had lost his entire immediate family in the Holocaust – advocated for changing the date from the 27th of Nisan to the 9th of Av. He argued that there could only be so many days of mourning on the Jewish calendar, and that rolling Yom HaShoah into Tisha B’av would help the Jewish people connect to both ancient and modern tragedies. Many prominent rabbis agreed with him, including both of Israel’s Chief Rabbis, Rav Ovadia Yosef and Rav Shlomo Goren, as well as Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, considered the father of Modern Orthodoxy.
But even these illustrious names couldn’t convince the public or the Knesset to change the date. Because others argued, persuasively in my opinion, thatYom HaShoah had to stay put in Nissan.
After all, in springtime, kids are still in school, and the day becomes a valuable opportunity to teach the next generation about the Holocaust. Tisha B’av, in contrast, is in the summer, when school is out. Hausner worried about the pedagogical implications of changing the date, and ultimately, he won the day. At least, among Israeli politicians.
Many of Israel’s Haredi communities, however, continue to hold out. In the year 2000, Yisrael Spiegel wrote an op-ed in the Haredi newspaper defending the community’s decision to ignore the 27th of Nisan. He asked, quote, “who made the greater contribution to the rehabilitation of the Jewish people… those who legislated a “memorial day” and arranged ceremonies, built museums and monuments; or those [meaning, Haredi Jews] who simply restocked the ranks and, through amazing personal sacrifice, with no selfish considerations [ . .], did everything to improve the state of Israel’s demographic situation, in order to reinstate as far as possible, that which was lost?”
In other words, he’s setting up a pretty uncomfortable binary between Haredim and non-Haredim, arguing that Haredi families have responded to the Holocaust in the most effective way possible. They don’t build monuments or designate days of mourning. Instead, they have large Jewish families – a demographic middle finger to anyone who tries to erase the Jewish people.
But I think this is an unnecessary binary. To me, it’s a yes and. Every Jew and non-Jew has to grapple with the Holocaust in their own way. Monuments, museums, moments of silence, having more kids, if you are Jewish, investing in Jewish education, and for all of us, investing in education, reading books, hosting a podcast, bowing your head during the siren… all of these are valid expressions of memory and grief. We don’t have to choose between one or the other. Unfortunately, the world keeps supplying fresh tragedies. And the Jewish people respond with untapped wellsprings of resilience.
So that’s the story behind Yom HaShoah veh haGevurah, and these are your five fast facts:
- Yom HaShoah VeHaGevurah, Holocaust and Heroism Day, is the official Holocaust Remembrance Day of the State of Israel, and is widely commemorated by Jewish communities around the world.
- Yom HaShoah falls on the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nissan, in the spring, right between the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Israeli Independence Day.
- The link between the uprising and Independence Day is no accident. It’s a symbolic reminder that the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters and the State of Israel had the same goal – and that the state will pour every resource into ensuring that Jews have a refuge.
- Some religious Jewish communities prefer to commemorate the Holocaust on Tisha B’Av rather than the 27th of Nisan, linking the Holocaust to a chain of ancient tragedies.
- Jewish days of mourning continue to take on new resonance with each tragedy. But at their core, these days are not solely devoted to mourning. They also symbolize resilience. Because thousands of years later, we’re still here to remember.
Those are your five fast facts, but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it.
I know I just dedicated an entire episode to the Holocaust. Rightfully! The Holocaust is important! But there are two aspects of Holocaust education that really grind my gears.
The first is the all-consuming emphasis on this tragedy. So many Jews understand their Judaism through the lens of Nazis and ghettos and death camps. And those things are incredibly important moments in our history. But they are not the whole story. And if this is all you know about your Judaism, you’re missing out on what Judaism is really about.
This isn’t a new idea, of course. Rabbi David Hartman (of blessed memory) reflected on this more than 40 years ago, in an essay titled “Auschwitz or Sinai?”, in which he argues that while it’s critical to remember Auschwitz, we can’t understand our Judaism through the negatives. Instead, we have to see our Judaism as a continuation of the covenant we made at Sinai so many thousands of years ago. Or, as he puts it, quote:
“Auschwitz, like all Jewish suffering of the past, must be absorbed and understood within the normative framework of Sinai. We will mourn forever because of the memory of Auschwitz. We will build a healthy new society because of the memory of Sinai.”
I couldn’t agree more.
But how? How do you do this? How do you remember what happened to you, without getting bogged down in your victimhood? How do you honor both Auschwitz and Sinai?
I thought about this question endlessly for seven years. Because for seven years, Raizie and I took my students to Poland and Israel to learn about the Holocaust.
And for seven years, I watched my students struggle. I watched them cry, and throw up, and grapple with the question of evil. Where was God? They asked me. Why did this happen?
Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, who by the way is the most fascinating guy ever, had an answer to this question. He himself had served as a rabbi in Berlin during the early years of the Nazis, moving to England in 1940. The inferno could have swallowed him, too. And unsurprisingly, much of his work is very concerned with the theology of the Holocaust.
His answer to where was God was… where was man?
That was the key to reaching my students.
Let me explain.
For seven years, Raizie and I tried to change the narrative. We started by rebranding the trip. It was no longer the Poland trip, or, oh man, even worse, the Auschwitz trip. Instead, we called it the Poland-Israel Experience. And we meant it. We wanted it to be an experience – an opportunity for students to grapple with Auschwitz and realize it doesn’t cancel out Sinai.
We wanted them to remember that there is joy and agency and pride in being Jewish. That the story isn’t just one of victimhood.
And the most powerful expression of this came at the monument on 18 Mila Street, dedicated to Mordechai Anielewicz.
We told them the story of the uprising. We told them the story of this 24 year old, and his band of malnourished and determined teenagers, who refused to die quietly. Who didn’t flinch when death knocked at their door. Who instead ran out to meet it, guns firing.
And I’d watch my students’ faces change. From anguish to curiosity to a kind of glowing pride. Where was God? That didn’t matter as much. Where was man? Man was right here, resisting. Fighting. Proud and unbroken. Heroic.
This, too, is the covenant we forged at Sinai. The deep meaning that gave the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters such bravery and resolve.
And that is the story of the Jewish people that every student in this country should know. Not just the story of Auschwitz, or the Holocaust, but the story of our resilience.
That’s the duality of our Judaism, of our Jewish state, of the Jewish story writ large.
I’m in awe of that sweet lady at the health insurance company, who marched into her son’s school to berate his principal. I’m so touched and warmed by her insistence on teaching history, on knowing the truth.
But if I could tell her – and the principal – anything, it would be this:
We are bigger than Auschwitz. When we commemorate the tragedy of the Holocaust, we also commemorate the heroism of its victims and survivors. We aren’t defined by what was done to us, but what we ourselves do.
That is both a massive responsibility and an incredible opportunity. And we all have the power to decide how to meet it.