Yom HaShoah
Here’s the view from Jerusalem on this somber day, courtesy of Jewlicious.
Here is a selection of Yom Hashoah-related news and commentary:
— Speaking during a ceremony at Auschwitz, Israeli military chief-of-staff Gabi Ashkenazi says, “We have learned our lesson and we take very seriously the threats of state leaders who call for the destruction of Israel.”
— The New York Jewish Week explores whether the March of the Living, which brings thousands of Jews to Poland each year, has taken into account the reemergence of Jewish life in that country,
— The New York Times has the story of a Torah scroll that made its way “from the fetid barracks of Auschwitz to the ark of the Central Synagogue at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street.”
— A Los Angeles Times blogger notes that Holocaust Memorial Day kicks off Israel’s “most loaded week.” “In exactly one week, the country shall commemorate its war and terror victims, back to back with Independence Day the following day,” Batsheva Sobelman writes. “The essence of Israeliness compressed into a week of transitions: past to present, grief to celebration, individual to collective, Jew to Israeli.”
— We are, by now, used to hearing the testimony of Holocaust survivors. Now, however, some former Nazis are telling their stories, which, the JTA says, “represent a fast-disappearing opportunity to record the history of the Holocaust based on recollections of former perpetrators, collaborators or sympathizers.”
— A supposed documentary on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV suggests that Jews perpetrated the Holocaust themselves in order to get rid of disabled Jews and garner world sympathy. “There is,” The Jerusalem Post notes, “some tension in the film between blaming the Jews for the massacre of Jews, and denying the massacre took place.”
— Tel Aviv-based blogger Lisa Goldman has some thoughts on how Jews grapple with the “collective trauma that is visited unto the third generation — and probably beyond.”
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