In 1951, the Knesset established 27 Nisan – a week after Pesach – as Yom HaShoah. This year Erev Yom HaShoah is next Monday, 13 April. It is now almost one hundred years since the Nazis came to power. Already a quarter of the way into the 21st century, how should we be marking Yom HaShoah in our communities? How much longer should we be giving it the prominence it now has?
It was not always so. In my 1950s childhood in North-West London, there was no official Jewish community commemoration of what was still called, then, the ‘Holocaust.’ There was a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Commemoration at the (now closed) Scala theatre in London. In retrospect, however, that event seemed to focus more on that one act of Jewish resistance than on what happened to European Jewry as a whole between 1933 and 1945.
Leslie Hardman, my childhood rabbi in Hendon United Synagogue, had been an 8th army chaplain at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, and spoke about it from the pulpit. But that was unusual in Anglo-Jewry. “During the 1950s,” observes Wikipedia, “Jewish educational and communal institutions generally avoided public discussions of the Holocaust, aiming instead to integrate and conform to British social norms.”
My first community was in Paris in 1971. The Shoah was ever present: many members were either camp survivors or had spent the war in hiding. All remembered having to wear the yellow star. The synagogue had been closed during the war and Nazi Jackboots had trodden the pavement outside. In the 1970s the myth that’s every French man and woman had been in the Resistance began to be called into question.
When I became rabbi at Southgate and District Reform Synagogue in 1977, I was gently asked not to talk too much about the Holocaust “as your predecessor had done.” It was almost as if it was an embarrassment for them. The word ‘Shoah’ was still not part of Jewish, let-alone non-Jewish, discourse. Rabbi Hugo Gryn was one of the first to begin talking publicly to the non-Jewish world about the Shoah in 1978, moved to do so, among other things, by the Holocaust Denial that he was witnessing. Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ only came out in 1985.
In Southgate we began marking Erev Yom HaShoah in 1981. Only a few synagogues were doing so at that time. We had a Yizkor Service and then an invited Shoah survivor spoke to us of their experiences.
From the 1980s onwards more and more survivors were prepared to talk publicly. But over the next 25 years, fewer and fewer survivors were, obviously, still alive. And now, 80 years on, for a survivor to be alive with any conscious memory of what they experienced means they would be in their 90s or older. Soon there will not be any survivors alive. How then should we be marking Yom HaShoah?
Barely a week ago we sat around our Seder tables and told our story, read our history book. But, from the perspective of Yom HaShoah, just what is that Jewish story? And which part of the Haggadah tells it more authentically, more accurately? It uses a particular phrase twice but in strikingly different ways.
As we begin telling the story of the Exodus, we read v’he sh’amdah continuing b’chol dor va’dor, “in every generation, people rise up against us to destroy us.” Is the eternal narrative of the Jewish people, then, nothing more than a perpetual “vale of tears”? Does everything that has happened since October 7th lead us to argue that this is indeed, sadly, our eternal story? That would mean keeping the Shoah at the forefront of our consciousness, needing to be commemorated for ever and ever, b’chol dor va’dor.
But that same phrase comes up once again in the Haggadah. B’chol dor va’dor “in every generation every individual must see themselves as if they personally were going out of Egypt.”
There is always a choice between these two b’chol dor va’dors. I am a Shoah-obsessive. We should never forget what happened. But that said, even I recognise the negative effect that the Shoah has had on Jewish life. It has skewed our responses to what is happening in the present because we see that present too often through the spectacles of the past. We react as if another Shoah is always around the corner: “this is how it all began in the 1930s” is the refrain. But it is not helpful. Even given the aftermath of October 7th, Heaton Park, Bondi Beach, Hatzolah ambulances, it is still just a tiny minority of ‘crazies’ who are doing those things and the government, now, is supporting the Jews. In the 1930s, the ‘crazies’ were the government.
Which b’chol dor va’dor reflects our ‘master narrative’ more authentically, then? In this time where naked antisemitism has been exposed, when the pressure of the past couple of years draws us towards that first b’chol dor va’dor, which narrative do we choose to make ours, not because of that antisemitism, but in spite of it?
Pesach and Yom HaShoah. Creation and destruction – beginnings and endings – independence and subjugation – hope and despair. Looking back, looking forward.
We Jews are, as the prophet Zechariah called us, assirei tikvah, “prisoners of hope.” We have to have that discussion about how to mark Yom HaShoah in the future, aware of that first b’chol dor va’dor but affirming and living by the second one.