Category Archives: Holocaust

Letter Published by The New York Times

To the Editor:

In his lengthy lamentation about Israel’s ostensible descent into genocide, Omer Bartov somehow overlooks a most germane distinction between Israel’s war to vanquish an enemy bent on its destruction and murderous campaigns like those that took place in Bosnia, Darfur, Armenia, Rwanda and Cambodia — and certainly the one carried out by Nazi Germany.

How Israel is waging its war against an enemy that has loudly declared its genocidal intentions is rightly open to criticism, and subject, too, to a reasoned defense. But it is a strange sort of “genocide” that can end immediately with the rulers of the attacked region simply laying down their arms, releasing those they kidnapped who are still alive and leaving the scene.

(Rabbi) Avi Shafran

Staten Island

Two Quotes

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi:

“The US… has committed a grave violation of… international law… by attacking Iran’s peaceful nuclear installations.”

Benito Mussolini, in 1936:

“[Our German alliance] is… animated by a desire for peace ….”

Peace, yeah.

Reaction to Zoharan Mamdani

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was asked about the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” He declined to condemn the phrase and, in its defense, said that “The very word [Intifada] has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into Arabic because it’s a word that means struggle.”

Yes, and in math class, an equation has a “Final Solution.”

Ugly Fringes

We have Tucker Carlson to thank for creating some long-needed pan-partisan unity of late. To read how he managed that, please click here.

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Holocaust

In my opinion, a professor at Hebrew University, when seeking in a New York Times opinion piece to divorce the Shemini Atzeres massacre from Holocaust references, missed the forest for the trees. The reason I think that can be read here.

The Jewish summer weeks of mourning

Summer, for religious Jews, isn’t all barbecues and vacations. And the fast days we observe are particularly timely these days, when the Jewish connection to Eretz Yisrael is overlooked, or even denied, by some. You can read my thoughts about the matter here.

Contextualizing the Holocaust

The effort to educate American young people about the hate-born evil that engulfed much of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s has been something less than a resounding success. I have a suggestion about what to replace Holocaust units with. You can read about it here.

President Biden Echoes the Haggadah

Something in particular struck me about President Biden’s October 10 speech about Israel.

To read what it was, click here.

A Nazi’s Revealing Order

There are railcars and there are railcars.

A document from a horrible moment in Holocaust history was recently discovered by a Tel Aviv University PhD candidate. You can read about it here.

Parshas Re’ei – Survivors

Kol yimei chayecha – “All the days of your life” – is a phrase we first meet in the Torah when Hashem pronounces the fate of Adam after the sin of eating from the eitz hadaas: “Cursed is the ground because of you. Through suffering will you eat from it all the days of your life” (Beraishis 3:17).

The phrase recurs in a seemingly unrelated context, about the mitzvah of eating matzah on Pesach, in our parsha: “…so that you will remember the day you left Egypt all the days of your life” (Devarim 16:3).

That pasuk, cited in the Haggadah, elicited a novel thought from Rav Avrohom, the first Rebbe of Slonim: “When recounting Yetzias Mitzrayim, one should remember, too, ‘all the days’ of his own life – the miracles and wonders that Hashem performed for him throughout…”

The generation before mine, the one that came of age during the Second World War, could well relate to that idea. My father endured years of forced labor in Siberia, courtesy of the Soviet Union. My father-in-law was a veteran of several concentration camps, and suffered the deprivations and tortures for which they are infamous.

And, I know, on Pesach, thoughts of their experiences were in their minds. My father and his friends pocketing and then hiding a few wheat kernels here and there, to be secretly ground and baked in the middle of the night into matzos. My father-in-law, in a Dachau satellite camp, reciting with a friend parts of the Haggadah they knew by heart.

But the Slonimer Rebbe’s thought is appropriate for every life, even lives of relative calm and plenty like our own. Because, as a result of the sin of the eitz hadaas, adversity and tragedy entered the world and came to define all humans’ lives, to one or another extent. We all have experienced things that were daunting or worse, and from which we were saved. We may not have been liberated from a literal gulag or camp, but we are all, on one or another level, survivors.

And we need to consciously recall that fact, all the days of our lives.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Reflections on Jews, Judaism, Media and Life