TODAY

     Today is a day where it is hard to write my own words. It is a day that often brings me to tears and to thoughts of "what if". Today is a day for contemplation, for thought, for history - both past, and present and even into the future, perhaps most importantly into the future. It is a day when I will present the words of others who have said it far more eloquently than I. Please read and think and for those who attended last nite's ceremony at the Morse, it was an evening well spent. What was amazing to me at one point was when the host spoke of his grandparents and how they met - his grandmother hearing the grandfather sing the Hatikva at liberation, liking it and coming over to him telling him so and then saying she would like to marry him. And so they did and I read of the story on You Tube that very day.
     In any case, in no particular order, hear the words of others. Remember the Holocaust but more important, remember those who perished within it, those who were killed, burned, gassed, choked, beaten, drowned, frozen to death, shot, knived, buried alive, experimented upon  and any other horrific manner of death. To forget them is to forget life itself.


     Last Friday, Old Navy posted the ad to Twitter
, promoting a sale with a photo of an attractive, happy interracial family in an embrace. Within hours, a backlash was apparent, with hashtags like #BoycottOldNavy and #WhiteGenocide, and messages like “Stop promoting race mixing, you degenerates,” and “I don’t shop at stores ...

   In the days since, there has been a backlash to the backlash, with hundreds of people voicing their rejection of the prejudiced messages in the most personal way possible, posting photos of their own interracial families, often with the hashtag #LoveWins

     

.....It held a referendum in which the village’s 56 registered inhabitants agreed to shed its medieval name — Castrillo Matajudíos, which roughly translates as Little Hill Fort of Jew Killers. Instead, it is now called Castrillo Mota de Judíos, or something like Little Hill Fort of Jews.

Since then, however, the village has become a victim of repeated acts of vandalism, mostly anti-Semitic graffiti, that the mayor attributes to unknown far-right extremist groups that, he believes, have no direct connection to his village.

      ... the importance of zachor, of remembrance of the victims defamed, demonized and dehumanized as prologue and justification for genocide

    ... state-sanctioned ideology of hate. It is this teaching of contempt, this demonizing of the other, this is where it all begins. As the Canadian Supreme Court affirmed, “The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers – it began with words.” 

      Jews died at Auschwitz because of anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism did not die there. As we have learned only too tragically, while it begins with Jews, it doesn’t end with Jews.

     .... crimes of indifference, from conspiracies of silence – from the international community as bystander.

     “From the latest information received from Poland, it is evident that the Germans, with the most ruthless cruelty, are now murdering the few remaining Jews in Poland. Behind the ghetto’s walls the last act of a tragedy unprecedented in history is being performed

“The responsibility for this crime of murdering the entire Jewish population of Poland falls in the first instance on the perpetrators, but indirectly it is also a burden on the whole of humanity, the people and the governments of the Allied states which thus far have made no effort toward concrete action for the purpose of curtailing this crime.

“From some 3,500,000 Polish Jews and about 700,000 other Jews deported to Poland from other countries — according to official statistics provided by the underground Bund organization — there remained in April of this year only about 300,000, and this remaining murder still goes on.”

  I could go on and on, but the meaning is very clear. We are all responsible for mass tragedies, mass killings, if only because we have not done enough to stop it and even more so have allowed it to bloom with its rotten seeds quite openly - as in England, the Netherlands, Sweden, the Arab lands and even here. Hate produces more hate and the world steams with its foul odor. Standing by the sides and thinking that it does not affect you, that you are not one of the hated group or even are, but live in another country - think again. Each person is a universe in him or herself. Each generation denied the right to be born is a loss for mankind. Each person murdered is a loss of those generations to come. Have we not had enough already? May G-d send His light to shine upon us all that we might see the truth and truly understand all that we must do, that is upon us, to do Tikkun Olam, the repairing of the world.