As a third generation of the holocaust, and daughter of the second generation of the Holocaust, as the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day comes around, I find myself time and time again debating what is the best way to commemorate - not only my family and the millions of other victims, but, above all, how to instill Holocaust remembrance to those that don’t have a direct connection as I do.
This year, as crimes against humanity take place before our very eyes in the same geographical areas where the Holocaust of the European Jews took place, and the forests resonate with the memory of Babi Yar, there is no escape from asking: Has the world learned anything since the 1940s? The concept of "man-to-man inhumanity," first coined by Scottish poet Robert Burns in his poem "Man was Born into Mourning," takes on a new meaning in the face of the millions of refugees fleeing bloody Ukraine.
For the past seventy-seven years, since the Holocaust took place, we have sworn to "remember and not forget," but how will we accomplish this? What moral responsibility do we have, as the ones charged with Holocaust remembrance, in times of crisis? And so I return to what has become the center of my life: to remind the world, through the testimonies of the survivors who still live with us, what happened to the victims of the Holocaust and what future generations can learn from them. And in the words of 92-year-old Erika Yaakobi, who survived Auschwitz: "If I could influence, even one person, to fight evil, and not come to terms with discrimination, injustice and intolerance, I did my part.”
The hourglass is running out, and now, in the race against time, we must document, and promote the testimonies of living survivors, in all of the media outlets we have available to us. The Department for Israel and Holocaust Commemoration Worldwide at the World Zionist Organization, in collaboration with the USC Shoa Foundation, (the foundation for documentation founded by Steven Spielberg), is currently appealing to all survivors who have not yet testified, to be interviewed and make their voices heard. The "Memory in the Living Room" project is also an excellent platform for presenting survivors' testimonies to wide audiences, as well as our intergenerational project “6 Million Followers.”
We recently celebrated Passover, with the commandment "to repeat the Haggadah to your son." In dealing with the question of how the absence of survivors will affect our responsibility in commemorating the Holocaust, there is no doubt that our job now is to resonate and spread the voices of survivors, as long as they are with us, to future generations, to ensure that "from destruction, we can redeem something for the future.” Says Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: "to fight hatred through love, violence with compassion, and death through an uncompromising charge of life.”
The author, Tova Dorfman, is the Deputy Chairwoman of the World Zionist Organization and Head of the Department for Israel and Holocaust Commemoration Worldwide at the World Zionist Organization.