Education key to recalling Holocaust
Holocaust memorial services take place every year in April all over the world. Fatigue of memorializing past calamities occurs often, especially when every new generation is further and further removed from being personally affected. How do we keep the younger generation engaged?
Inever met my grandparents David and Esther, Shlomo and Chaia-Helena. I never Facetimed or Snapchatted with my first cousins Sarah or Miriam, or the twins Ephraim and Nahum. Uncles Eli, Avner, Henyek, Joseph, Abraham and Shimon, and Aunt Chava never had the opportunity to impart their wisdom on me. They, along with 30 other close family members, were murdered by the Nazis in Poland 75 years ago.
It is my obligation, as a son of Holocaust survivors, to remind those who are aware of the Holocaust and teach those who are unaware, that merely 75 years ago, unspeakable atrocities took place as a part of a systematic campaign to destroy my people. Sadly, humankind has continued to commit genocides in this modern era in the name of ethnicity, religion and politics. Myanmar, Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia are examples of large-scale atrocities in the past 40 years.
Yet 22 percent of Americans ages 18-24 and 11 percent of those ages 25-34 have never heard of the Holocaust. Holocaust memorial services take place every year in April all over the world. Fatigue of memorializing past calamities occurs often, especially when every new generation is further and further removed from being personally affected. How do we keep the younger generation engaged? How do we circumvent the human tendency to forget history? In the era of “fake news,” how do we force Holocaust deniers to own up to their twisted, psychotic agenda when the Germans themselves never denied the Holocaust?
Education! Education and indefatigable insistence on memorial services that have poignant content to keep young people engaged. Tours of Holocaust museums and memorials; tours of concentration camps; testimonials from survivors (who are rapidly passing on) or their kin. In the classroom, several dedicated teachers have advanced a Holocaust-conscious curriculum. Should we mandate a deeper coursework of human-made disasters to etch them deeper into our children’s’ psyche?
In this country, we do not have an annual memorial service to the 620,000 who perished in the Civil War. Do they deserve an annual moment of silence and reflection? How can we forget the 55 million to 80 million people who died in World War II? Number of casualties is but one poignant metric of human evil. Another is intolerance. Another is ignorance, which is directly related to poor education.
I liken my family history to the Survivor Tree at the Oklahoma City Memorial. It, too, lost most of its branches and leaves in the 1995 bombing, only to recover and thrive and yield saplings that now are grown trees all over the city, including my front yard. My 45 close relatives and 6 million Jews of blessed memory who perished in the Holocaust cannot be replaced. Their legacy, however, is now nurtured by children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren of survivors and victims who, in my own family, are threefold the number of those slain. Reshef practices medicine in Oklahoma City.