Should this memorial serve as a wordless reminder of past lessons, or should the history of the Holocaust be a platform for dialogue about present events and lessons unlearned? How do we balance the universality of those tough lessons and the uniqueness of the historical event?

It would be no exaggeration to say that October 7th was the most traumatic event for the Jewish people since the Second World War. It is for a reason that the images of the terrible massacre awakened the most horrifying feelings, fears, and analogies in the collective memory of our people.

Nevertheless, we must be particularly cautious in making comparisons of any contemporary events, even the most difficult and tragic ones for our people, to the Holocaust. While it is indeed possible to draw some analogies, we must do so very cautiously, as this is a very slippery slope that often leads to the highly undesirable phenomenon of diluting the memory of the Holocaust and making inappropriate comparisons.

Unfortunately, there’s no need to look far for examples. Even the current events in the Gaza Strip are being cynically compared by some journalists, public, and political figures to vivid symbols of the Shoah. Some of them manage to compare The Gaza Strip, which has been under exclusive Palestinian control since 2005, to Nazi ghettos, the attack of October 7th to the Jewish uprising in those ghettos, and the Israeli army’s entirely justified military response to the brutal terrorist attack on its borders – to their elimination.

The very legal definition of the intentional extermination of a people, developed under the influence of the Holocaust events and the Nuremberg trials after the war, is today being eroded by its use against Israel in an indictment in the UN International Court of Justice in The Hague.

In a world of abundant information and growing populism, we see more and more inverted truths and cynical distortions of reality, where the events of the Holocaust, if not denied at all, are being used for provocative headlines and speculations more and more.

But going back to the events of October 7th and analyzing their perception in Israeli society and the Jewish world, we can truly understand the analogies and feelings that arose on that day. After all, the massacres were committed based on the fundamentalist ideology of radical hatred and dehumanization of Israelis. The methods of killing included unthinkable, inhumane atrocities and abuses that are hard to comprehend. And what thousands of residents of the captured communities near the Gaza border and participants of the music festival near Re’im experienced was a sense of total insecurity in the face of a force that seeks your extermination.

It is this deep sense of fear, born of centuries of brutal persecution of Jews and brought to unthinkable proportions during the Second World War, that the Jewish State has endeavored to eradicate forever by the very fact of its creation and the strength it has acquired over the years. Israel has indeed instilled an almost unshakable sense of security and confidence in its citizens.

Sadly, on October 7th, this feeling was broken for a given time, leaving space for deep fears and traumas of the past once again. And yet, despite the confusion and the State’s failure to fulfill its duty to its citizens in the first hours of that very morning, the State of Israel was able to stop the terror attack and respond with a powerful blow to the enemy.

That is precisely why the rally of yellow stars on the clothes of the Israeli diplomatic mission to the UN was perceived so controversially. It may be that hatred of Jews is still the same hatred, and radical anti-Semitism is once again raising its head around the world, but unlike the times when yellow stars were a humiliating measure, today, we have a decent response to it.

We must do everything possible to ensure that malfunctions like the one on October 7th do not happen ever again so that we continue to talk about horrifying events only in the context of history, as we do every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Along with conventional educational methods and discussion of the Holocaust, it is necessary to bring a new approach to this dialogue and examine this topic from new perspectives.

Even when it comes to such an important historical topic as the Holocaust, decades of the same rhetoric and extensive education, while playing an important role for specific groups, do not increase or maintain interest in this topic among the masses. Especially in the current conditions of the so-called clip culture and a massive flow of information, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the vast and complex topic of the Holocaust to break through the informational volume. This is also why we see such surprising results from surveys in different countries, similar to the one recently published by the Claims Conference, where respondents demonstrated mostly superficial knowledge about the Holocaust.

In this regard, it is very important to include this topic in official educational programs, as the president of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress claimed in his recent column. In addition, we have to adapt and find new angles and methods of presenting history in the modern information space.

As Lindsay Zemler writes in an article for Tel Aviv University, until recently, it had been unacceptable to directly raise the topic of the Holocaust in film.  The Holocaust did not become a popular theme of films until the 1970s and 1980s, even forming a separate genre. Gradually, the boundaries of what was permitted in the context of displaying the Holocaust shifted and today there are many films that reveal those events from various angles.

There is no doubt that cinematography has made a considerable contribution in raising awareness of the history of the Holocaust. However, according to Yael Mazor, a lecturer at the TAU Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, in addition to the already known depiction of the Holocaust in films, we must be open to new interpretations and maintain an active dialogue about those events. Today, when the number of living witnesses of the Holocaust is decreasing, it is especially important to form “new ways of memory.”

These may be new, not sufficiently disclosed side events of the story, difficult new questions, or new ways of displaying and trying to comprehend what happened.

An interesting step in this direction was the project Eva Stories, documenting the history of a family during the Holocaust in the form of posts and stories in an Instagram account. The project, which sparked a great debate about such methods of displaying a sensitive topic, nevertheless gathered more than a million subscribers.

 

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In 2020, a TikTok trend in which young content creators portrayed themselves as time-displaced victims of the Holocaust came under similar criticism. However, according to Tom Divon, an Israeli researcher on this topic in social networks, what matters more is not the presentation of the topic itself, which seems artificial and simplified, but the interest among teenagers – who often have no connection with Judaism –  to create such content in the first place.

It’s hard to disagree with this. Despite the delicacy of the topic, ignoring the new means of communication and content consumption on the part of traditional institutions inevitably leads to a generational gap in the dialogue about the Holocaust. Ultimately, it is the viral content in modern social networks that has the potential to reach millions quickly and raise mass awareness. We have to adapt to it strategically.

The Euro-Asian Jewish Congress pays great attention to the preservation of memory and distribution of knowledge about the Holocaust. In this regard, SHOA, a special resource, was created to collect information in the form of initiatives and mini-projects online, revealing the events and issues of the Holocaust interactively, in clear language with easy navigation.

In 2020, we supported the production of the animated movie 263 Nights. Most people are aware of the Minsk Ghetto, but not everyone knows the story of 26 Minsk Jews who hid from the horrors of the Nazi occupation in a basement for 263 days and nights. This animated movie reveals the lesser-known history of the Jews of Minsk.

In December 2021, at the 7th Moscow Jewish Film Festival, the film was nominated for the best short documentary, and it has been screened at several international film festivals. Yefim Gimelstein, on whose behalf the film is narrated, lives in Israel today. Yefim was hiding in the basement as a six-year-old child and today he is one of the two surviving witnesses of those events.

Another important perspective of the Holocaust is the history of the Righteous Among the Nations. In October 2021, with the support of the EAJC, Righteous Among the Nations. Ukraine, a book about Ukrainians who saved Jews during the Holocaust, was published. The book contains almost 2,700 names, officially recognized today by the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky and President of Israel Isaac Herzog contributed a foreword to the book.

By presenting new stories, facts and views of the terrible events of the Holocaust, we are refreshing the dialogue and keeping it from being forgotten. We have a responsibility to raise awareness and interest of this topic among younger generations, while preventing the denial, trivialization and politicization of the Holocaust.

Recognition of the Holocaust on a state level should not be a matter of politics. It should just be done

It was just 80 years ago. On 20th of January, in a cosy suburb of Berlin the terrifying decision was made, luckily never to become a complete reality. The decision was to apply the ‘Final Solution’ – literally to exterminate the Jewish population of the Eurasian continent and not only. For somebody who isn’t familiar with the story of Wansee conference, especially nowadays, it may sound like something very abstract and not realistic. Unfortunately it was not so back in 1942. Germans, who made this decision, were pretty well planed regarding the execution of this monstrous plan. The rest is history.

As we move further and further away from these events, and for some they tend to seem more and more abstract and less relevant today, the issue of official Holocaust recognition is becoming even more crucial. Obviously, not always the historical facts are something that we easily agree on as nations and states. Moreover, in a world where ideologies are spreading way faster than ever, where gaining popularity for some bizarre, ungrounded theories – is sometimes a matter of days, historical truth is somewhat a ‘rare element’ that has to be preserved. Sadly even such a tragedy for the Jewish people and the whole world is becoming a matter of politics.

That’s why an International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27th of January is not just a formality, especially when it’s adopted as an official memorable date on a state-level. Recently, Azerbaijan made a decision to officially mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27. It was stated by the President of the Republic Ilham Aliyev during a meeting with the President of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, Rabbi Mark Schneier, a well-known supporter of the Judeo-Muslim interfaith dialogue. What’s making it even more special, Azerbaijan will become one of the few Muslim-majority countries to officially commemorate Holocaust victims.

In April 2021, as a part of ‘Abraham Accords’ normalization deals, the UAE became the first Muslim country to officially celebrate Israeli Yom HaShoah (27th of Nisan according to the Jewish calendar) along with the International Remembrance Day. In the summer of 2021, for the first time in the Arab world, the UAE hosted an exhibition dedicated to the Holocaust at The Crossroads of Civilization Museum in Dubai. Last year, Dr. Muhammad Al-Issa, former Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia and current Secretary General of the League of Arab States, visited Auschwitz as part of a Jewish-Muslim delegation.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is also officially marked in Albania – a Muslim-majority country as well. In 2020 a monument to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust was opened in Tirana. Albania is proud of the fact that during the Second World War, Albanians fiercely defended local Jews, and this area became the only one in Europe where the Jewish population increased during the war.

These official steps of Holocaust commemoration, especially in a Muslim world, – are a significant move forward, but not sufficient for the eradication of Holocaust denial trend. In this regard a next reasonable step would be adopting the working definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Among other aspects, this broad definition includes denying the fact, scope, mechanisms or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters during World War II. An IHRA definition, in our view, provides a solid legal base for fighting Holocaust denial and should be adopted by more states.

Euro-Asian Jewish Congress is actively involved in promoting the IHRA definition among states of the region and consistently urges its leaders to form a clear policy regarding Holocaust memory.

In April 2021, the Parliament of the Republic of Moldova adopted a law criminalizing Holocaust denial, propaganda of xenophobia, racism and fascism. Chairman of the Jewish community of Moldova, Vice-President of the EAJC, Alexander Bilinkis, was directly involved in the development of this law. In September, the similar law, which also includes criminal liability for Holocaust denial, was adopted in Ukraine.

Still we see swastikas on Jewish monuments or gravestones in Moldova and mass marches, glorifying Nazi collaborators in Ukraine. In Russia, where according to the polls in the latest EAJC publication on antisemitism, most of the respondents heard about Holocaust, on a seminar for school principals in St. Petersburg the host appeared to be a dedicated Holocaust denier. Worth mentioning though that this lecturer was fired. But change doesn’t happen overnight. Proper legislation at least can help to hold the offenders accountable.

Ultimately, in terms of history, 80 years is a very short period of time. But as we can see, in terms of reality perception and historical truth, it can be quite challenging. With all the evidence, with all the preserving and educative efforts, Holocaust recognition and denial is still a major issue. In times when it became a question of politics and agenda, we do call on the authorities of all countries to pass legislation prohibiting the Holocaust denial, ratify the IHRA definition of antisemitism and integrate Holocaust studies into government educational programs.

However, even today we see the attempts to revive the cult of hatred. Hotbeds of anti-Semitism continue to erupt despite the bitter lessons of the World War II. Jews around the world face manifestations of anti-Semitism. The rhetoric of hatred is reflected in oral and written forms, despite all the attempts to eradicate it: Jews are attacked on the streets, their synagogues and cemeteries are desecrated. We have a responsibility to continue to fight these dangerous phenomena.

The acceptance of the anti-Semitism definition, as formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), by all the states and international organizations can be a significant step in the fight against anti-Semitism and racism. There is no place for hatred and anger in the modern society, and we must do everything possible to prevent a new potential round of violence. Peace and prosperity will never come in a world where basic human values are violated, and therefore it is our people, who survived a terrible tragedy that must guard these values.

At the end of last year, the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress adopted a Resolution calling to oficially adopt the working definition of anti-Semitism, as well as condemn the attempts to rehabilitate those involved in the crimes of the Holocaust. The resolution calls on the authorities of the countries of the region to adopt the necessary legislative acts prohibiting the rehabilitation of collaborators and the silencing of their crimes. We are convinced that glorification of persons involved in such crimes leads to a significant increase of anti-Semitic sentiments, phenomenon, we are trying to eradicate.

On the International Holocaust Remembrance Day we must say once again no to anti-Semitism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and any intolerance, as well as remember those who lived, survived and died in inhuman conditions, fought the enemy and won, saved other people’s lives by exposing themselves to mortal danger. May their memory be blessed!