Dear Friends,
Today, Wednesday 27th January, is Holocaust Memorial Day. Its primary focus is to remember the many millions of Jews who were ‘murdered’ by the Nazis during WW2. The chosen date is the anniversary of the Liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Soviet army in 1945. The word derives from the Greek, ‘Holokausten’ – That which is completely burnt, from the Hebrew ‘ola’ – ‘That which goes up’, and refers to the sacrifice of an animal on the altar which is totally consumed by fire. A whole burnt offering. One cannot escape the obvious parallel with the chosen method of disposal of the dead – mass cremation – used in the camps such as Auschwitz. As the years pass, so there are fewer and fewer ‘direct living links’, fewer and fewer ‘holocaust survivors’ still alive to tell their stories, but such is the structure of Jewish family life it is unlikely that any Jewish family cannot identify within their history victims of the Holocaust. Hence today will be a very special, a very poignant day for all of our Jewish neighbours and friends and we should all find a moment during the day to say a prayer on their behalf. More recently, the scope of HMD has been widened to include the remembering of more recent acts of Genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia Darfur; each of which are within my own living memory. Genocide is defined as ‘the intentional act of destroying a people – ethnic, national, racial or religious – and so the ‘Holocaust’ of the Jews by the Nazis was an act of Genocide, but its peculiar circumstances mean that it alone is described as a ‘Holocaust’. And of course, there can be no doubt that the examples of Genocide to which we have been referred are just the ‘most well-known’, the ‘most well publicised’; no doubt there have been other examples contained within borders and about which we know nothing until it is too late. For instance, only relatively recently has attention turned to the so-called ‘Massacre of the Armenians’ by the Turks early in the 20th Century. One of our Iranian congregants is of Armenian heritage, his forebears having escaped from Armenia at the time into what is now Northern Iran. ‘Holocaust’, ‘Genocide’, ‘Massacre’, to which we can add the equally distasteful phrase, ‘ethnic cleansing’. Why is today important? Holocaust survivor, Eli Weisel sums it up perfectly…
“For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
We have our own Days of ‘Remembrance’, but today teaches us that for the sake of the future, the past must be allowed to influence the present…