Yom Hashoah

I have written over the years of this blog about Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It still puzzles me that there are still quasi-halachic arguments against having this particular day of remembrance.  Yes, this day is for we Jews to take a moment to contemplate the horrors that were the Holocaust.  And perhaps even more importantly, it is a day for the world to remember that for all the touted sophistication and education that the world claims to possess today, it is still only a short while ago that the lurking barbarity and viciousness of the Nazis and their supporters unleashed the Holocaust.  Mankind may be capable of doing much good but is also capable of the basest evil, and the only way to guard against that evil's rising up again is to remember that it happened and to pledge again that it shall not occur now or in the future.

Strange how even as an adult I can feel the loss of things I never got to experience.  I still miss never having had the soft hand of a grandmother to comfort me and encourage me to go on.  I miss never having heard my grandfathers as they chanted certain niggunim, even though my parents passed on those niggunim to me.  I love my mother dearly, as I did my father a"h, but the child within me still cries for the grandparents and aunts and uncles whose absence was sorely felt, taken from me by the evildoers of the Holocaust.

So yes, today is a day to remember the Holocaust, to let the pain out, to say to the world "This happened, it happened to me and to mine, and yes, you and yours were responsible."  Chas v'shalom that we should ever come to the point where people forget that there was a Holocaust, for in that type of forgetfulness lie the seeds of future evil doing.  Let us remember that "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" c"v.