This month Jews everywhere marked the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur to welcome our New Year. They are solemn days and a time for renewal shared with family and friends every year, even by the most secular Jewish people.
As a child I was moved by those days when I stood with my parents and siblings in our small synagogue and listened to the Hebrew prayers being chanted. I loved hearing the Shofar blown on Rosh Hashana and the time for reflection and hope at Yom Kippur, a day of atonement when we forgive ourselves for the past year’s transgressions and promise to do better in the coming year. I crafted a poem about these annual rituals some years ago as I remembered years gone by.
In that poem called “Kol Nidre” – the mournful prayer that marks Yom Kippur - I wrote this (edited) verse: “Kol Nidre and I am bound to every Jew, in every place, at every time…and in every corner of the globe [where] a Jew is standing, swaying, weeping, praying…I stand beside the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, and in the camps, and I am with the Jews of pogroms,… Kol Nidre, and I am everywhere and in every time there is a Jew to remember.”
Later I wrote another poem. It was inspired by my learning that I was born in the same month as the fall of the Krakow Ghetto. A month later the Warsaw Ghetto collapsed. “It happened over and over again, until the black saber of the Holocaust disemboweled European Jewry,” I wrote, imagining myself in Anne Frank’s attic, and wondered “if I would have had the courage, the cunning, the chutzpah to survive?” I imagined what it must have been like in Kracow and Waraw and Auschwitz “because I was born a Jew.” “I might have been among them, racing for a cellar, a closet, a bed cover. Anywhere where they could not, will not find me.”
I share those excerpts because both of my parents had fled pogroms in Ukraine with their families when they were children early in the 20th century, simply because they were Jewish. I share them because the pogroms and the Holocaust are part of my history and my heritage. I share them because I’ve read Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl and copious other writers who wrote true Holocaust stories. I share them because I’ve been to Yad Vashem and Holocaust museums and memorials here and in Europe, and I share them this year because for the first time I was afraid to attend High Holy Days services given the increase in anti-Semitism and the increasing denial of the Holocaust.
An April program on PBS’s News Hour reported that “antisemitism rose in the U.S. last year and shows little sign of abating worldwide,” according to researchers. Last year a similar study reported that “2021 set a new high for antisemitic incidents, and in some countries, most alarmingly the United States, it intensified.” Additionally, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) reported that the number of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. increased by more than 35 percent in the past year.
A survey reported in The Atlantic titled “The World Is Full of Holocaust Deniers,” almost ten years ago found that only 54 percent of the world’s population had heard of the Holocaust. Let that sink in: 54 percent, in 2014. Only a third of the world’s world population at that time believed the genocide had been accurately described in historical counts and 30 percent of survey respondents thought that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.”
Today the problem is exacerbated by social media and the Internet where misinformation, memes, and hate-filled posts that perpetuate antisemitism and Holocaust denial are proliferating. Most sites have done little to end this travesty in the name of free speech and debate. For example, Facebook and Twitter enacted weak policies prohibiting Holocaust denials a few years ago but as of this year, they continue to allow dangerous content on their sites. And they are not the only ones.
In 2022 the United Nations approved a resolution stating that genocide “will be forever a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.” Israel’s ambassador to the UN at the time went a bit further. A grandson of Holocaust victims, he said “the world lives in an era in which fiction is now becoming fact and the Holocaust is becoming a distant memory. Holocaust denial has spread like a cancer, and it has spread under our watch.”
The resolution and the rhetoric of politicians and diplomats seems to have had little impact. Holocaust denial and distortions are growing, and they are stunning, while antisemitism has risen in many countries. The Netherlands is one of them.
A government minister there made this statement at a cabinet meeting in July this year: “Denial of these kinds of heinous crimes against humanity is commonplace. …This … should not be left unaddressed, as the lesson of the Holocaust is not just a history lesson. It affects the here and now. … It is about good and evil.
He’s right of course. But we need more than words and resolutions to stop the scourge that has so many Jews frightened. We need to bear witness as the few remaining survivors of Auschwitz and other death camps give testimony. We need to read the books of Holocaust writers and to look at the photos and write poems. We need political action and responsible information platforms. And we need it all now so that we can feel safe - simply because we are Jewish.