Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) is a day of commemoration for the 6 million Jewish men, women and children who were murdered in the Holocaust. The Israeli parliament passed the legal observance of the day in 1959, and it was gradually adopted by most Jewish communities throughout the world. It is held on the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan (which falls in April or May). This year, Yom HaShoah is held April 28.

The few remaining Holocaust survivors and their families gather on Yom HaShoah with a special feeling. They cry for all that was lost: a father, a mother, a sister, a brother, a husband, a wife, a son and a daughter. They cry for all that was lost: a civilization, a language, a belief in the human spirit. It is an important part of Holocaust memory.

But how did those survivors, in the weeks and months after their liberation, seek to remember? They remembered and cried continuously. “We do not need a special yizkor,” the memorial service for the dead, one of them wrote. “Our yizkor is a continuous one and an unbroken one. We say yizkor in the evening, day, and night. We say it when we are awake and when we dream. Our hearts beat to yizkor and in our brains its rhythm rings without stop.”

To tell and to remember. That was a great part of what drove survivors onward. Such a passion belied the stark reality of living in a land, Germany or Austria, soaked with Jewish blood, of living in a giant cemetery with little or no hope of leaving any time soon.

How to remember was as important as the idea of memory itself. But despite their importance, the countless efforts at memorialization remained without any kind of order. Many of the survivors had no idea when they were supposed to say kaddish (a prayer for the dead) for their murdered loved ones. So the survivors decided to do something about that. They designated the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Iyar as the official day of remembrance and liberation.

It is difficult to believe that a group of survivors, penniless, physically and emotionally drained, and with personal losses that words and numbers could not describe, sought to make such an impact on the Jewish world. This effort to establish a new holy day in the Jewish calendar would be a step, a revolutionary road, an extraordinary vision only a year after liberation.

The survivor organizations sent telegrams to the international Jewish community informing it of their decision. But no positive replies were received, only objections by rabbinic authorities that the survivors had no right to legislate for the entire Jewish people.

That the survivors were not successful is important in demonstrating their dilemma, and their sense of being marginalized within the Jewish world. It was a feeling that would continue for another quarter-century or more until the Jewish world understood what the Holocaust had meant as one of the singular events of Jewish and world history.

Jews are a people of memory. We do not forget our exodus from Egypt and our journey from slavery to freedom. We do not forget our martyrs of the Holocaust, but it took the better part of several decades before those Jews who had lived in freedom and safety would understand that it was important for all Jews to remember.

Survivors live in an American nation that gradually opened its doors to them, that allowed a museum in Washington on the site of its most sacred national soil to tell the story of their suffering. America remembers the victims in a way that allows Jews and non-Jews to begin to understand why survivors shed tears on this special day. That will not stop those tears, but it gives survivors a sense of hope that their murdered families did not die in vain.

 

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