| Kfar Maccabiah, May 2024
ניסן, תשפ”ד |
Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Day |
The Shoah, and the 614th mitzvah: Keeping our Jewish-Zionist identity |
Dear Friends,
The Shoah is the biggest genocide in the History of Humanity. It was the systematic action of wiping out the entire Jewish people, an objective achieved in most of Continental Europe, with the worst mass murder ever carried out in death factories and concentration camps. It featured the precise and meticulous execution of the perverse Nazi German machine, along with multiple accomplices and partners in the span of just under 6 years (1939-1945). Six million lives were cut short by the most extreme of hatred: men and women; elderly, adults and children – so many, many children! – were torn from their homes, crowded into ghettos, and eventually brutally murdered in gas chambers, mass shootings, and grueling torture.
For more than 20 years, our Movement established its “Maccabi Future Leaders Forum”, the Forum that ensures the renewal of the ranks of our leadership, in a first Seminar in Poland. Young Maccabi leaders from eight European countries met in Warsaw to begin training in Zionism, ethics and Jewish holidays, the situation in the Middle East, Maccabi ideology… and, also, Shoah. This last subject, in particular, was imposed for obvious reasons: we were in the city with the largest Jewish population in pre-Holocaust Europe, Warsaw, which in 1939 had 400,000 Jews – one in every three of its inhabitants. In the early 2000s, Warsaw had only about 2,000 Jews in organized community life. We asked ourselves then: How to continue with our educational programs, in the face of the overwhelming size of the massacre perpetuated – in the face of the millions of souls that still cry out from the earth?
Our humble, small, but I believe, significant answer then and now, is that death, and especially that imposed on us by the irrational hatred of anti-Semitism, must be answered with life, our renewed Jewish life and the deepening of our Jewish being.To confront the attempt to physically and spiritually annihilate our people, our actions today must concentrate on reinforcing our task, fortifying the development of leaders, learning better and more about our Jewish sources, on tying ourselves to the State of Israel in mutual bonds of meaning, especially today, under physical war and harassed by a renewed hatred with fascisms from left and right… The only possible posthumous victory against the Nazi hosts is to fight against assimilation, to maintain our Jewish-Zionist identity precisely in these days where Jewish communities around the world are being harassed solely for existing, for their Judaism, for their connection to our ancestral homeland, for the love of the State of Israel that marks our redeemed national rebirth.This is what Professor Emil Fackenheim termed “the 614th mitzvah (commandment)“[1]: the “Jewish Resistance” to assimilation.
The size of our tragedy is immeasurable, irrecoverable… but the perpetuation of the memory of those Jews who died for the Holiness of the Name, “al Kiddush Hashem”, guarantees honor to their memory and the many messages they carried with pride. Our first small Maccabi contribution is, then that of our Jewish continuity (the first Maccabi ideal): a continuity that evokes the memory of the mass murder of communities and innumerable masses of children of Israel; a contribution that keeps alive the richness of their thought and action, the prolific nature of their individual and common contributions to human culture, and the sacredness of their spirit. Our second contribution will be in the renewal of our commitment to our Zionism (the second Maccabi ideal): strength in the face of those who want to deny us the right to our ancient and native national life in the State of Israel.
May this Yom HaShoah, this day of commemoration of our brothers and sisters so vilely assassinated six decades ago, find us in search of the deepening of our Judaism in memory of the members of the great Jewish Communities disappeared into the abyss; may this day find us reinforcing our relationship with Medinat Israel, and strengthening our Maccabi resistance to the ravages of assimilation and the loss of our identity.
May the lives of the Six Million be always remembered, blessed, honored and perpetuated by our deeds, for we are their living memorial.
Chazak ve’ematz!
Rabbi Carlos A. Tapiero
Deputy CEO & Director of Education
Maccabi World Union
