The Free Press
Tonight is Yom HaShoah, the day of commemoration for our murdered millions, for the few but shining examples of those who had the chance to rebel and fight back, and for the unfathomable courage of those who simply survived and rebuilt their lives.
Why do we mark it on this date on the Jewish calendar, the 27th of Nissan? (As the 27th falls on Friday this year, the marking of the day was moved up, per longstanding tradition, so that Israeli public ceremonies won’t interfere with Sabbath observances.)
There were other suggestions for the date: The ninth of Av, the traditional Jewish fast day that marks the destruction of the two temples and various exiles, expulsions, and other calamities throughout our history; the 14th of Nissan, the eve of Passover, the day in which the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was launched against the Nazis; the 10th of Tevet, which falls in the winter and serves as another traditional Jewish day of mourning and fasting.
In the end, the Jews of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in the British Mandate period, decided on the familiar 27th of Nissan, because it had already been established in the pre-state Jewish community as a day “for remembrance of heroism” for those killed in the Arab Revolt, which began on that day, April 19 for the rest of the world, in 1936.
These dead were not distant strangers from long ago. Those killed in the Revolt, and even more so the dead of the Holocaust, were still fresh and intimate and known to them, real people rather than moral abstractions. They felt intimately close to the destruction in a way that’s hard to imagine now.
Indeed, the very bill that established the 27th of Nissan as Yom HaShoah was drafted by Knesset member Mordechai Nurock, a rabbi from Latvia whose wife Dvora and sons Eliyahu and Tzvi-Baruch were murdered by the Nazis.
By the time his law establishing Yom Hashoah passed in the Knesset in 1951, over 140,000 “displaced persons” from Europe’s displaced persons (DP) camps had arrived in Israel. Every Israeli knew someone—a sibling, a friend, a neighbor—who had survived the genocide.
In many ways, then, this transformation of the community’s existing memorial day into Yom HaShoah was a way for survivors and victims to lay claim to their trauma.
It makes Yom HaShoah something more than only a remembrance of victimhood and death. It connects destruction to rebirth, vulnerability to redemption, the death of European Jewry to the new life of Israeli Jewry.
It is a day for remembering not only what was lost, but also for asserting that there are no real solutions to the problem of vulnerability except self-reliance.
When we teach about the Holocaust, we usually focus on the fundamentals: The experience of the Jewish victims—the helplessness, the suffering, the mass death—and the social and political factors that made the extermination possible.
But this year—in this new age of forgetfulness and dishonesty, when even the great and wise, professors and activists, and even, here and there, some rabbis, purposefully forget their history in service to the base prejudices of their cultural milieus and indulge in the ahistorical ignorance of antizionism—it is important to speak plainly. To speak clearly about those among us who foresaw, who warned and acted, who saved what could be saved while others dithered and fretted.
It is unpleasant. But important nonetheless.
At the start of the 20th century, only a minority of Jews were political Zionists . Most Jews still clung to the hope that, despite pogroms and oppressive laws, European liberalism would ultimately win out; or to the promise of universal equality trumpeted by the communists; or to the ultra-Orthodox call for a return to the physical, cultural, and spiritual safety of a renewed ghetto.
The Zionists were a minority. Right up until they weren’t. Right up until Europe itself left Jews with no other choice.
Put very simply: Zionism, alone among Jewish movements and cultural worlds of the diaspora in the 19th and early 20th centuries, knew what was coming.
The early Zionists saw only dimly, vaguely, the bloodletting that would come. But this foreknowledge rested on serious analysis and theory, and recommended clear action. This was true across the political spectrum of the Zionist movement, from socialists to liberals to right-wing Revisionists.
Theodore Herzl, in a letter addressed to the Rothschilds early in his Zionist career, gave this ominous prediction: “Will it be a revolutionary expropriation from below or a reactionary confiscation from above? Will they chase us away? Will they kill us? I have a fair idea it will take all these forms, and others.”
Professor Jacques Kornberg wrote in his intellectual biography of the founder of the modern Zionist movement that “Herzl could utter chilling prophecies about the fate that awaited Jews in Europe” because he possessed “an ominous sense of the fanatic dimensions hatred of Jews could take, and hence the special dangers imperiling Jews in an age of potential political instability and disorder.”
Herzl could see the utility of antisemitism—to observe and then explain its usefulness to demagogues in a Europe torn by the social upheavals and disruptions of modernity.
Herzl’s heir David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, was equally prescient.
In 1934, as he passed through Geneva on his way from London to Tel Aviv, Ben-Gurion had a rare meeting with two Arab journalists and leaders, Shakib Arslan and Ihsan al-Jabri. It was a gathering set up by the extraordinary and almost totally forgotten Palestinian leader Musa Alami, an incident I’d never heard of until I read Oren Kessler’s book Palestine 1936.
In their conversation, Ben-Gurion told his Arab interlocutors that he expected six to eight million Jews to ultimately populate the forthcoming Jewish state, because Jews were imperiled in Europe. Arslan and al-Jabri, despite agreeing to strict confidentiality and telling Ben-Gurion their conversation was informal and off the record, published his comments with mocking derision in the November 1934 edition of their journal La Nation Arabe. A frustrated Ben-Gurion would not meet prominent Arabs again for a year and a half.
What did Ben-Gurion know? What was he trying to say? And what were his Arab interlocutors failing to hear?
In October 1938, a month after Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich and before most people dared to even imagine anything so insane, Ben-Gurion was already warning of a coming annihilation of the Jews, as Tuvia Friling writes in his brilliant two-volume book, Arrows in the Dark.
“The outbreak of a world war—which the Arabs are so vehemently in favor of—will place us once again in danger of abandonment and absolute siege. . . . Hitler is not only the enemy and annihilator of the Jews of Germany. His sadistic and jealous desire is to annihilate the whole of world Jewry,” Ben-Gurion said.
This dire foreboding was the logic behind the Zionist willingness to negotiate with the Nazis for the rescue of Jews, as in the Haavara agreement. This was an agreement in 1933 between the Zionist leadership and the Nazi regime to allow Jews to leave Germany with some of their property. (Nazi Germany did not allow Jews to take their property with them when they fled, causing many to stay behind in hopes of surviving the new regime and rebuilding their old lives.)
Many diaspora Jewish leaders, especially in America, were angered by the agreement, which they felt legitimized dealing with the Nazis just when they were trying to push for a global boycott of Germany. But the Zionists insisted on the policy, not because they downplayed Nazi intentions, but because they believed the Nazis were infinitely worse than Jews in the diaspora really understood. These Zionists understood (not all of them, but enough of the ones who mattered) that every Jew who could be convinced to leave Germany early through the Haavara agreement, some 60,000 by 1939, would be literally saved by it.
In December 1938, just a few weeks after Kristallnacht, Ben-Gurion again offered an explicit, public prediction of extermination. “The Nazi pogrom of last November,” he said at a conference in Jerusalem, “is a signal for the destruction of the Jews of the world. I hope I will prove wrong. But I suspect that this German pogrom is but the beginning. It started in Germany. Who knows what will happen tomorrow in Czechoslovakia. . . in Poland, in Romania, and other countries? Until now even Satan did not dare to carry out such a plan. Now everything is permissible. Our blood, our honor, our property. . . . There are no limits as to what can be done to the Jews.”
And in June 1939, three months before the outbreak of war: “Hitler is a fact and he can be relied upon in this regard. If there is a world war and he takes control of Europe, he will carry out this thing; first of all, he will annihilate the Jews of Europe.”
The Zionists, almost entirely alone, saw it coming.
And so on Yom HaShoah we remember not only the dead, though we spend most of the day recalling their names and lives and stories and the whole lost civilization of European Jews. We remember not only what we have lost, but also that it was by our own initiative and wisdom that the survivors came out of that great death and into a new day, a new/old Jewishness, an unapologetic survival and flourishing.
So let the antisemites rage, let them build their moral worlds on our story in thick layers of hatred, conspiracy, and righteous pretense, offering us, as ever, the most reliable signal of their dysfunction and decline. There’s nothing new in that.
What is new is us—our clarity and purpose, a Jewish collective shorn of the blindnesses and vulnerabilities of the past.
This Yom HaShoah in Jerusalem, I will think about what we might have been able to do for our brethren if we’d been established and strong just a decade sooner. I will think about our strength as much as our weakness, about the ever-present, unfulfillable duty to rebuild what was destroyed. I will reflect on the evil stories told of us that never really go away, but that don’t, in the end, matter anymore. Because those who could see around history’s dark and dangerous corners finally freed us from their grip.
Haviv Rettig Gur is the host of the Ask Haviv Anything podcast, a veteran Israeli journalist, and senior analyst at The Times of Israel.
For more on Yom HaShoah:
Think of the Holocaust in the Netherlands and a single image likely comes to mind: a smiling teenage girl, her dark hair tucked behind her ear, her eyes expressive. Published in more than 70 languages, Anne Frank’s chronicle of the two-plus years she and seven others spent hiding in the back rooms of an Amsterdam building, sustained by non-Jewish friends, is a global phenomenon. Thanks in large part to Anne’s story and iconic status, there is a general perception that the Dutch were a nation of resisters who protected their Jewish neighbors.