Keep Your Holocaust Remembrance Day

The 27th of January marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day – the day chosen by the international community to commemorate the catastrophe that destroyed one third of the Jewish people.

Although the day universalizes the Shoah and plays down the uniquely Jewish aspects of what took place, the day is still viewed by many Jews as a triumph in the face of the rising Holocaust denial that has accompanied the dying out of the generation that lived through it.

But looking deeper at how the day has been institutionalized reveals a clear intention for how future generations are meant to understand what took place.

The date isn’t arbitrary. It has deep meaning. January 27 marks the day on which the Allies – who did everything possible to avoid interfering with the destruction of our people – arrived at Auschwitz and “liberated” those Jews not yet exterminated by the Germans.

By choosing this date to commemorate the Holocaust, the nations who aided in the genocide of our people have now essentially recast themselves as the heroes who came to our rescue.

In the 1930s and 40s, Britain ruled our homeland and actively prevented desperate Jews from escaping Europe. Those of us who somehow managed to make it out of Nazi-controlled territory were prevented from entering Palestine and, in some cases, left to die at sea.

The governments of the countries between Nazi-occupied Europe and British-occupied Palestine were pressured by London not to grant passage to Jews, trapping many behind German lines who could have otherwise escaped.

The United States also turned away Jewish refugees. And, similar to its wartime allies, Washington refused to bomb death camps or the transportation lines leading to them.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration even enlisted official Jewish establishment leaders like Stephen Wise to silence public outrage and help keep American Jews in the dark about what was taking place to their brothers and sisters in Europe.

Chase Bank, Random House Publishing, Kodak, IBM, Standard Oil, Coca-Cola, Ford and other American companies also did plenty of business with Nazi Germany and benefited materially from the Shoah.

Millions of our people could have been saved at almost any point throughout the war had the Allies simply included Jewish rescue as one of their war aims. To establish a day to commemorate the Holocaust in such a way that retroactively casts the Allies as the heroes that saved us not only distorts the historical record but also insults the memory of each Jew needlessly killed.

The Jewish people are fully capable of selecting our own dates for commemorating our own tragedies, according to our own calendar and our own understanding of what events mean within the context of our people’s historic experience.

Yom HaZikaron l’Shoah v’l’Gvura (Memorial Day for the Holocaust & the Heroism) is on the 27th of Nisan. That day commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and it was established by the Jewish people to commemorate the heroism of those Jews who physically resisted the Germans.

We also use the tenth of Tevet as a day to mourn the loss of the individuals killed and the ninth of Av to contextualize the Holocaust as a national catastrophe (among the other catastrophes that resulted from our having been displaced from our land by the Roman Empire).

When it comes to commemorating the Holocaust, the international community should really follow the Jewish people’s lead. We can select our own dates and manner in which to commemorate our own tragedies. If the Western powers are truly interested in respecting the catastrophe our people suffered, they should choose one of the dates we’ve already selected to confront their complicity in our genocide.