By Rabbi Dr. Bernhard H. Rosenberg
EDISON, New Jersey –In the emotion of the moment, 90-year-old Holocaust survivor Miriam Schlisser contended that “Hamas atrocities were many times worse than the Nazis.” That is a mistaken notion. Please do not call this horrible war a Holocaust. During the Holocaust, there was not one but many instances of pogroms and mass murders like what occurred on Oct. 7th. The Holocaust was much bigger, more systematized, and cumulatively far more horrible than the massacre perpetrated by Hamas.
However, some of the effects of this war are the same as the Holocaust. Many will seek all their lives for survivors not knowing they are dead or alive. Numerous Israeli families lost children to these barbarians and in some cases will have to remarry, just like in the Holocaust.
My father’s first wife was murdered together with two children. For survivors of this war PTSD will be rampant as it is in the Holocaust community. I have a son, his wife and their two babies in Jerusalem. My oldest grandson is learning in a yeshiva in Israel. I have a nephew and cousins living in Israel, some of whom have been called up to go to war. I feel your pain, brothers and sisters, can send you a hug and offer prayers. I basically do not sleep as I am writing articles in media around the world. I just came back from Israel and attended the funeral of over 40 Israeli soldiers. I just met my newfound cousins discovered through DNA.
The horrors of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps will soon be lost to living memory. But the recent rise in antisemitism and the current war in Israel underline the need never to forget
Four years after the January 27, 1945 liberation of the largest Nazi extermination camp, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno observed: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” He came to revise that view, along with its implication that a kind of silence was perhaps the only possible response to the horror of the Holocaust. Later, he wrote that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man to scream” The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau—as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
On this upcoming annual day of commemoration, the UN urges every member state to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism and to develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides. The world must never forget.
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Rabbi Dr. Bernhard H. Rosenberg is rabbi emeritus of Congregation Beth-El in Edison, New Jersey and is the author of Theological and Halachich Reflections on the Holocaust, among other books.