Yom HaShoah is actually not a day of mourning. We have other days for that. The 9th of Av is the date on which we remember the Holocaust as a national catastrophe and the 10th of Tevet is the date set aside to remember the individual Jews slaughtered by the Nazi Germans and their accomplices.
On each of these days of mourning, the people of Israel generally observe a fast.
But the 27th of Nisan, however, was never intended to be a sad day.
Yom HaZikaron l’Shoah v’laGvura was actually established to commemorate the fact that in the midst of all that horror, some Jews found the courage to engage in armed resistance against their oppressors. Some Jews managed to spill Nazi blood.
The originally date intended for Yom HaShoah was the 14th of Nisan – the day that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began. But because that date is Erev Pesaḥ, Yom HaShoah was moved two weeks later to avoid interfering with the festival of our freedom.
But even the choice of the date indicates the true intention behind the day.
The purpose isn’t to fetishize violence but rather to remember that one of the primary ways the Germans were able to control the Jews and prevent us from resisting even in situations where we outnumbered them 50-1 was by creating the conditions for each of us to be exclusively concerned with our own personal survival.
We honor those who were able to break free from the Nazi-induced mentality of narrow self-preservation and risk their lives to challenge evil because, in doing so, they reclaimed a humanity that had been systematically taken from us.
This short video explains why Yom HaShoah actually celebrates a type of violent resistance that was an expression of love, stemming from an awareness that Israel is more than a mere collection of fragmented individuals.
