Fresh Updates from RAC

“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” ― Elie Wiesel

Sixty-seven years ago perhaps the greatest travesty of the modern era came to a close as the Holocaust was finally was exiled to the dust of history. The images, testimonials and artifacts of Nazi Germany’s attempt to exterminate the Jews, Gypsies, Gays and other minorities have been burned into our collective memories. The principles of industry been used as instruments of death were used as never before in the quest of one race to prove itself dominant over all others.

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Marking the 68^th anniversary of Raoul Wallenberg’s arrest by Soviet troops in Budapest, Hungary, the Canadian Post honored the late hero with the release of a commemorative stamp. Read more…

In the midst of my summer in Washington D.C. participating in the Machon Kaplan program, I spent two and a half days at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum participating in its “What You Do Matters” Student Leadership Summit. The tagline of the event was “how to create environments where hate cannot flourish,” and the focus of the programming was to understand propaganda and hate speech while promoting civic engagement to combat both. The theme was tailored around the museum’s current exhibition- State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda. The summit drew students from five countries and 26 states, representing a diverse spectrum of ideas.

As an intern at Americans for Peace Now, an organization that works to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I see the importance of overcoming hatred, especially on this issue. I saw the What You Do Matters Summit as an opportunity to pursue a deeper knowledge in this area. I was expecting to leave the summit with a better idea of how to create communities where, as the tagline reads, hate cannot flourish. I was expecting to delve into the history of the Holocaust and learn about ways we can individually overcome indifference and hate. However, the summit provided much more than that. I walked away with a plethora of new ideas, exposure to personal stories and the encouragement to turn a vision into reality.

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Earlier this week the last known gay Jewish Holocaust survivor, Gad Beck, passed away. In many ways he defied being a victim — he snuck into a deportation center to free his boyfriend, for example, and was an active member of the Resistance.

Gad Beck was a hero in many ways, defying the Nazi regime and death itself. He survived the camps and went on to fight for equality for LGBT people, saying famously, “God doesn’t punish for a life of love.” His fight for justice – for not only Jews but gays and lesbians as well – has been profiled in two documentaries: “The Life of Gad Beck” and “Paragraph 175.”

Much can be said about his remarkable life and his contributions to the struggle for LGBT equality. But his death also provides an opportunity for a larger discussion about the way the Jewish community often relates to the Holocaust and non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Jewish organizations, including our own Reform Movement, frequently reference “the six million victims of the Holocaust,” but this formulation is problematic: To use phrases such as “the six million victims of the Holocaust” is to ignore the five to six million other victims who perished in the concentration camps alongside Jewish victims. Read more…

I have just returned from eight days touring the sites of Judaism in Central Europe with six teenagers and one soon-to-be HUC student.

When I first interviewed at my current congregation, I was asked, “Rabbi, what do you think about our Confirmation trip to Europe?” As I had looked at the synagogue website before the interview and noticed that it highlighted two things – the Confirmation trip and the Adult Education program – I knew that this was an important question. I started with, “I’m not sure why the trip doesn’t go to Israel…” When a murmur ran around the room and someone said, “You’re not the first candidate to say that,” I took a breath, re-trenched, and finished, “… but I am looking forward to giving the trip a try and learning what makes it so special.”

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To this day, I still cannot comprehend how one person and some of his fellow countrymen could have carried out acts that decimated not only the Jewish communities of Europe, but also targeted any group of people they deemed unworthy. The countless men, women and children who were systematically murdered for their religious beliefs, cultural practices, mental capacity, physical ability or sexual orientation are remembered today on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.  Read more…

What does it mean to remember? It is to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it. Elie Wiesel.

Today is the 66th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, an annual day of commemoration to honor all the victims of the Nazi regime.

Estelle Laughlin, a Holocaust survivor, once beautifully explained, “Memory is what shapes us. It is what teaches us. We must understand it is where our redemption is.” I come from a country where holocaust education has been mandated in every school since 1991. Not only that, but the British government sponsors two students a year from every high school in England, thousands altogether, to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau through the Holocaust Educational Trust‘s “Lessons from Auschwitz” Project. Only on coming to America did I realize how unusual this was.

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We teach our children in religious school the story of Anne Frank; our congregations often mention the victims of the Holocaust when they recite the mourner’s kaddish; and, every May, we stand together as Jewish people on Holocaust Memorial Day. While all of these serve as our testament as Jews to the value and promise to “never forget” we need to ensure that we as Americans also “never forget” our commitment to the survivors of the Holocaust, 127,000 of whom are still living in the United States.

There is important legislation in the House of Representatives, being voted on today, to ensure that aging Holocaust survivors, three quarters of whom are over the age of 80, receive the services from the government they need to age with dignity. Holocaust survivors are five times more likely to fall below the poverty line than other older Americans and studies have further shown that institutionalized care for survivors has a disproportionately negative affect.

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