Two days are dedicated to Holocaust commemoration – International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 and Holocaust Remembrance Day on the 27th of Nisan. Both memorial days represent diametrically opposed responses to the Holocaust. International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorates the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz and universalizes the Holocaust as a moral lesson against “intolerance” and “hatred.”
One week before Israel’s memorial day for its fallen soldiers and its day of independence, Holocaust Remembrance Day represents “m’Shoah l’Tekuma” – from Destruction to Rebirth. This day was chosen for its proximity to the date of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was postponed by two weeks due to Passover. In a world where the Holocaust is increasingly stripped of its meaning in Jewish history, the link between the Holocaust and the Rebirth must be re-emphasized.
The importance of Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day
While the Final Solution was a German invention, historian Gotz Aly, in his seminal Europe Against the Jews, details a continent-wide campaign beginning in the late 19th century to murder, marginalize, and expel European Jewry. In countries as diverse as France, Greece, Poland, and Lithuania, successive governments restricted Jewish livelihoods, tolerated or incited pogroms, and pushed Jews to emigrate. The decades-long drive to rid Europe of its Jews explains the widespread and enthusiastic cooperation many European nations showed with the German murderers.
Faced with the crushing reality of modern antisemitism, European Jews turned to various “solutions” – assimilation or acculturation, ultra- or neo-Orthodoxy, Bundism, and various forms of Diasporism. In retrospect, the most wide-eyed and prescient of Jewish movements were the Zionists.
Theodor Herzl, confronted with the violent rejection of Jewish integration in Western Europe, wrote in his diary: “I cannot imagine what form this [expulsion] will take. Will it be a revolutionary expropriation from below, or a reactionary confiscation from above? Will they drive us out? Will they kill us? I expect all these forms.”
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of Revisionist Zionism and a bête noire for anti-Zionists, was even blunter. Speaking on Tisha B’Av in Warsaw in August 1938, he warned Polish Jewry: “the catastrophe is coming closer. My heart bleeds that you, dear brothers and sisters, do not see the volcano which will soon begin to spit its all-consuming lava.”
Zionism officially began as a mission to save European Jewry from destruction, but the Jewish state came too late for most. By the time the State of Israel was founded, two-thirds of European Jews had been murdered. Yet the Jewish state provided refuge to more than 300,000 Holocaust survivors in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Israel also served as a haven for more than half a million Jews from Arab and Muslim countries, many violently expelled because of rising Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. Israel also took in nearly a million Jews who were freed from Soviet oppression and from Ethiopian exile.
To the broken Jewish world after World War II, the State of Israel meant life and rebirth. Survivors were able to rebuild their lives, free in a Jewish state. Many American Jews, deeply ashamed of the community’s official passivity during the Holocaust, were filled with renewed energy as they took on the task of state-building.
In the Soviet Union, the Iron Curtain descended on a million Jews, and Jewish religion and nationalism were banned. Israel’s stunning victories in 1948 and 1967 sparked Jewish pride and resistance among Soviet Jews and ignited the campaign to free Soviet Jewry.
While it may be considered cliché in some circles, Israel represents an existential revolution in the Jewish condition. Hitler was emboldened by international indifference to the Jewish plight to escalate his campaign of persecution and murder. At the Evian Conference on Jewish Refugees, the nations of the world largely declined to admit German Jews. In the most real sense, Jews were completely powerless and abandoned.
Today, antisemitic bloodlust still motivates the Islamic Republic and its proxies worldwide. Ayatollah Khamenei and Iranian officials have pledged Israel’s annihilation, diverting Iranian funds and weapons to that purpose. This is no mere rhetoric – Iran has built a proxy network intended to encircle and overwhelm Israel at the right moment. Today, Jewish pilots in the air force of the Jewish state are able to eliminate Iran’s would-be genocidaires and their weapons programs.
For the Jewish people, the Holocaust was a definitive warning against complacency. Since Diaspora life remains precarious, a powerful State of Israel is the only ultimate guarantee of Jewish safety. From destruction to rebirth, the Jewish homeland remains the singular place where the nation can achieve a complete and secure rebirth, flourishing in every dimension of its identity.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Kohelet Policy Forum.