Letter from the Rabbi on Yom HaShoah

        Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) begins tonight and is a time for our people to remember and reflect. We remember those in our family who were killed in the Shoah whom we never had the chance to meet—siblings, grandparents and great-grandparents. We remember those who survived after witnessing the unimaginable, determined to begin life again. And we remember the stories they shared with us, wanting to teach us their experiences with humanity at its worst and sometimes at its best. Generations later, we continue to reflect on these stories, making sense of our own world in which violence and evil are all too present.
         In the last few days, I have been listening to some of these stories of a beloved friend in her 90’s which I recorded about a year before her death. Claire was like family to me. A dear friend and a wise elder for whom I had enormous love and admiration; she was my best friend’s mom whom I had known since I was a teenager. I knew, of course, that she was a survivor, but had never really heard the details of her experiences until a few years ago when I asked her to share them with me as I recorded. She told stories of her experience as a young girl in Germany, running from her Jewish school to her home for safety as the pogrom of Kristallnacht unfolded. She told stories of her family seeking refuge in Holland, and how after the German invasion of the Netherlands, she, her mother and sister were to go into separate hiding places. She told the story of her beloved father, who was betrayed, imprisoned and killed in a camp. I was listening deeply with my full heart, while my 92-year-old friend told me of her adolescence, moving from one hiding place to another during the war, in danger at every moment.
         These years were certainly extreme times. And yet, there were things I recognized in her telling of them. I recognized ordinary human beings who had to navigate those times and make choices. There were stories of people acting with ideological hatred, treachery, or ambition, like the Nazi youth, who informed on his girlfriend’s mother when he found the mother was helping Claire’s father to escape to Holland. On the other side, however, there were stories of those who exhibited kindness and goodness, like the young Jewish man who recognized Claire’s elder father in prison and would share his egg with him even though food was scarce. I heard stories of the Zionist youth organization in Holland who looked for and found Dutch families willing to harbor young Jews, and bravely and stealthily moved around the country checking on the well-being of those they hid. I heard a story of one Dutch family who hid Jews at great risk because they were religious Christians and believed this was what Jesus would have wanted. And I heard another story of a man who was a gardener for a university and would risk bringing books to young Claire so she could read as she was alone in hiding. These people were brave and inspiring souls who followed the principles of kindness and compassion even when it was dangerous. And yet they were also ordinary people, like you and me.
         Indeed, those were extreme times. And yet, they are not unrecognizable. We live today in a time when the President of our country last week called for a genocide on social media. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” We live in a time when over a million people in Lebanon have been displaced and over one-thousand killed. When Israelis are routinely forced to run to bomb shelters through the night. When 700 people in Gaza have been killed since the ceasefire. When people in the West Bank are victims of state sanctioned terrifying violence. When the Ukrainian people continue to fight for their lives and their freedom. When people in Sudan suffer horrific violence and human rights abuses. And in our own country, 13 people have already died in immigrant detention camps reported to have terrible conditions.
        This is our world right now. And we are the ordinary people that must make choices.
        By the time of Kristallnacht, it was extremely dangerous for people to speak out. Yet for us, there is still time. We must speak against hatred, cruelty and lawless authoritarianism wherever it is. We must act with kindness and compassion without regard to whether they are our “neighbors” or “the stranger.” This is what our Torah teaches.
        “Never again” is not a lesson for others to learn. It is a lesson for all of us. “Never again,” can only happen when we all understand that we are always one web of life, on one planet, in the image of one God.
          May the memories Claire and of all our loved ones who endured or were killed in the Shoah be for a blessing. May the memories of all the victims of hateful violence that continued since and continues still, move our hearts to action. And may the memories of those who insisted on kindness and decency to others strengthen us as we navigate these demanding times.