In years past, I've gone to community commemorations of Yom Hashoah out of obligation kind of what self-proclaimed "High Holy Days Jews" must feel on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But this year I didn't go. Not to hear survivors speak, or to hear people representing community synagogues reading the
names of Holocaust victims all night. I didn't seek out a single Holocaust-themed film or book or lecture. I didn't read a Kaddish or an "El Maleh Rachamim" for the souls of the murdered. I wasn't doing my taxes, nor was I out partying.
But I didn't forget the Holocaust; I remember it every day. It's just that Yom Hashoah community commemorations have fallen a little flat this year.
A look at the blogosphere reveals that it's not just me; this year's Holocaust Remembrance Day trend seems to be alienation. At BlogsofZion, Ariel Beery reflects that even though he's the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, he feels "strangely alienated" from Yom Hashoah commemorations:
"Maybe it has been the amount I've read about the Holocaust lately and the debates it has sparked," Beery writes. Maybe it is because I have come to believe that the way that the Holocaust is taught to Diaspora Jews furthers our own self-immolation, as we've come to aspire to the tradition of the martyr and the reflexive support for the underdog, whoever that underdog be. Maybe it is because my grandfather never wanted to talk about the Holocaust and because my grandmother won't stop talking about it."
Robbie, a Chicagoan currently in Israel and writing the blog Because I'm In My Twenties and It's What You Do, shares his guilt, saying that he feels like a bad Jew because Yom Hashoah is getting in his way. He also criticizes an educational system in which "everyone's teaching the same thing the same way and no one cares."
"I taught 8th graders last year who were so desensitized to the Holocaust they begged me to teach them something else," Robbie writes on his blog. "They had already been stuffed full of imagery and horror to the point of bursting.
Robbie goes on: I call myself a third-generation survivor, grandchild of survivors of the camps and great-nephew of a family that spent two and a half years hidden under a kitchen, 6 months of those years in a Nazi base. I celebrated my seventeenth birthday in Auschwitz, just like my grandfather. And I still said that Yom Hashoah was getting in the way."
YoYenta admitted that she "forgot to remember" Yom Hashoah in Savannah, Ga., but did "walk through the rather gory multimedia exhibit at the JEA by some of Savannah's mostly non-Jewish high schoolers last week, dozens of dioramas of barbed wire and Jude stars and old photographs." She remembers the day on her blog, calling Holocaust Remembrance Day "a day on which we are implored to 'never forget.' Which, of course, I did. So I'm saying an extra kaddish this morning for the six million and all the other souls who died unjustly, without mercy, in Europe under Hitler's evil reign. Heck, let it be said for everybody killed out of senseless prejudice, wherever and whenever."
What are we looking for when we remember Yom Hashoah? Something that makes us feel the loss again? Something that makes us feel less guilty for the relative privilege and freedom of our own circumstances? Something that motivates us to act on behalf of history and the 6 million who cannot act?
Perhaps the resonance of an increasingly distant 6 million has somewhat waned in active importance in the age of 9/11. Is a local, more recent trauma somehow more imminently relatable and more relevant than one suffered 70 years ago, even if the scale and circumstances are completely dissimilar?
And then there are those who spend their lives in service to the local, national or global Jewish community, wherein the specter of the Holocaust often looms as a lurking, motivational force that seems to say, "If you don't do a good enough job, it could happen here." But perhaps such hyper-awareness of the Holocaust has oversaturated us with images and guilt.
With the expectations of 6 million souls near palpable, even the most devoted of Jews are likely to feel that they've disappointed someone. But maybe it's that inherent sense of failure, the emptiness and longing at the center of the quest for an approval we'll never receive, that is legacy and remembrance enough.
