Woodside_park Synagogue

Yom Hashoah

This article below has been written by Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks and was published in the Daf Hashavua Volume 23: No.31.


In human terms, the Holocaust was the greatest tragedy in Jewish history. After it came a long silence as if the trauma was too great, the evil too overwhelming for mere words. The survivors concentrated on rebuilding their lives. The Jewish people turned to the urgent task of building a new nation in their ancestral home. The State of Israel was born and immediately had to be defended against the onslaught of war.

The silence was not total, but not until the Eichmann trial in 1961 did the dam of pent-up grief finally break, and there was a torrent of recollection and reflection. There were Holocaust histories, conferences, seminars, university courses, exhibitions, museums, memorials, documents and films. Almost everything that can be said or done about the Holocaust has been said or done, except one thing.

We still lack a way of giving the Shoah religious expression, in a way we do for the exodus on Pesach or the destruction of the Temples on Tisha be-Av. When the war was over, Jews wrestled with the question of what would constitute an act of religious remembrance. What date could you choose to mark an event that took place over several years during which each day thousands of Jews were killed? Eventually, after much debate, 27th Nisan was chosen.

What text could you use? No generally accepted liturgy has emerged. Many shuls hold Yom Hashoah services built around survivor testimonies. But the survivors are getting older and fewer. Our generation owes them the knowledge that their memory will live on. The time has come to begin shaping a service that will endure across the generations. Only when an act becomes a mitzvah is it endowed with permanence and Holocaust remembrance is part of the mitzvah of remembering Amalek the Jewish symbol of human evil.

So for the past two years we have assembled a group of rabbis, cantors, a choir and children of survivors to devise such a service, built around music and narration. Its theme is "From grief to hope" and the passing on of memory from one generation to the next. It has been held at Elstree and Borehamwood, Edgware Synagogues and at Ilford Synagogue and on all occasions it was intensely moving.

Holocaust commemoration has now spread far beyond the Jewish community. Let it not be said of us as Jews that we failed the victims and survivors as well as future generations by failing to create a lasting place for the Holocaust on the map of Jewish memory. It will tell for all time that though Hitler destroyed a third of our people he did not destroy our faith. The Jewish people still lives and living sanctifies life.