Robert Kraft to 'Post': Committed to combating antisemitism
The March of the Living is the manifestation of generations of Jews remembering and acknowledging our responsibility to ensure that the atrocities that occurred will never be forgotten or repeated.
By ROBERT KRAFT/GENESIS PRIZE LAUREATE 2019A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR holds the hand of his granddaughter during the annual ‘March of the Living’ at Auschwitz in May 2019(photo credit: REUTERS/KACPER PEMPEL)שמע ישראל אדוני אלוהינו אדוני אחד. ברוך שם כבוד מלכותו לעולם ועדShe’ma yisrael adonai eloheinu,adonai echad. Baruch shem kavod malchuto l’olam va’ed.These are the opening words to the Shema. The Shema is a prayer I gravitate to in special moments in my life be it in times of celebration, great accomplishment or times of stress or sadness. I put my hand on my head, close my eyes, and the words to the prayer of the Shema bring me great personal security and comfort.I had imagined I’d be saying these words at the gas chambers of Auschwitz on Yom HaShoah, seventy-five years after the liberation of the concentration camp, and where over a million people were murdered. These words which have been part of our tradition for millennia are said in our daily prayers -- when we arise in the morning and before we lie down at night. They are often the last words recited before death. Saying these words in a place where memories of pain, horror and destruction envelope a particular location, the death camps of Auschwitz, allows me to connect with the victims and feel rooted to the tragedy of our people. I imagine the many victims reciting these words as they knew death was imminent. How do we make sense of such destruction, incomprehensible sorrow and absolute devastation? How do we commemorate the tragedy in such a fashion that we ensure it is imprinted on our DNA, our children’s DNA, their children’s DNA and is never forgotten?Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, I had planned to participate in the March of the Living delegation this year, and I was humbled that I would bear witness to the memory of the individuals who perished in the atrocities during the Holocaust. I felt a deep sense of responsibility to be present amongst the 10,000 other individuals all coming together for one purpose- l’zkhor- to remember. In Yosef Haim Yerushalmi’s masterpiece, Zakhor: Jewish History and Memory, the historian notes that the word zakhor appears about 200 hundred times in the TaNaKh. Jews are commanded to remember the Sabbath; to remember the covenant between God and Abraham; to remember the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt (as we did this past week as we read from the Haggadah); to remember what the ruler Amalek did to the Israelite community as they wandered in the desert. It is this commandment of remembering that in many ways has sustained the Jewish people and communities throughout diaspora.An essential component of Jewish tradition is the ritual act of recording events and ethical practices and then recounting them verbally in every generation. It is precisely these actions that enable the creation of meta-narratives. These meta-narratives bind us as a people and encode our collective identity in our DNA, including our traumas. The combination of remembering, commemorating and recounting has served as a psychological tool for the Jewish people and not merely as a historical accounting.The March of the Living is the manifestation of generations of Jews remembering, commemorating, bearing witness, and acknowledging our responsibility to ensure that the atrocities that occurred at the hands of fellow human beings will never be forgotten or repeated.For me, the inhumanity and destruction represented by the Shoah demands each of us to commit ourselves anew to ensuring that the ideology that creates fertile ground for antisemitism be addressed. For many of us who knew survivors, it seems incomprehensible that we are once again seeing signs of hatred emerging within our communities. Did humanity already forget the lessons of history? Have we not learned from our past the consequences of dehumanization? We cannot allow fomentation of hatred, bigotry and prejudice to persist in the 21st century. This cannot become common place. It is incumbent upon each of us to combat antisemitism wherever it rears its ugly head.I have committed myself to this work, thereby establishing a new organization called the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism. I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to make antisemitism socially unacceptable and to sensitize and educate people of all backgrounds. As a global community, we must ensure the future of our people and all peoples, no matter your background or beliefs. We must create an intolerance for antisemitism and prevent it from seeping into the crevices of our fragile societies.There is no room in our communities to allow hatred toward the Jewish people to exist, and it is our moral imperative to stand tall, to remember and to denounce repugnant actions against our people clearly and unabashedly. We know that words and ideas have consequences. Antisemitism is a threat to freedom, not only for us, but for all peoples. We cannot cede our freedom to those who advocate hate. עם ישראל חי
