Yom Hashoah in the shadow of October 7
Marking 80 years since Jews were freed from the horror of the Holocaust
Sitting around the Pesach table on seder night we discussed how our ancestors, the Israelites were slaves in Egypt. But this year I said to my family, “Our grandparents were also slaves in concentration camps, and our people are still slaves in Gaza.”
My grandmother Bronia Rosenberg was a slave labourer in HASAG making ammunitions, before she was sent to starve at Bergen Belson. Her father Yeheskial Rosenberg was a slave labourer at Treblinka before he fought in an uprising with his son Szmul and were both killed. My grandfather Tuvia Mittelman was selected to work at HASAG from the Czestochowa ghetto, he was later taken to Auschwitz. Being selected to be a slave labourer along with his two brothers saved their lives, his family and remaining siblings were killed at Treblinka.
As we sang from the Haggadah Vehi Sheamda, “In every generation they try to destroy us, and God saves us from their hands”, such words never felt more true.
As we mark Yom Hashoah in the shadow of the October 7, the murder of six million Jews during WWII and 80 years since Jews were liberated from the Nazis, we acutely understand that hatred towards Jewish people has existed for thousands of years and is unlikely to disappear.
While some may look at the Holocaust as a uniquely horrible time in which the Nazis attempt to eradicate Jews from the earth by shooting men, women and children in pits, and gassing them in human abattoirs, while most were silent, the dehumanisation of Jewish people in the aftermath of October 7 reminds us that such hatred still exists.
It is frightening to consider how Nazi propaganda so easily convinced a ‘civilised’ German society to dehumanise Jews as vermin, yet today we have social media platforms including X and Telegram, where hatred is unleashed on steroids without shame and restriction.
One only needs to look at the comments section on a news article on social media about the Israeli hostages to see the results. For example, on a Facebook news article about freed hostage Eli Sharabi speaking at the UN, one commented to the effect of “He’s lying, his nose gets bigger as he speaks”. When I replied, “This man’s wife and two daughters were murdered by Hamas and he was taken hostage and kept under torturous conditions. All of these are facts”, I was told “Sounds like you are the one supporting genocidal terrorists”. In the world of social media there are no shared facts.
Some acts have been more brazen, such as the burning of the Adass Israel Synagogue, “Die Jews” graffitied on a Jewish School and Nazis gathering on parliament steps.
I wonder what my grandparents would say to me? I wonder what their parents who were murdered by the Nazis would say? A voice inside tells me it would be to tell their story.
My grandparents passed away before they told me their testimony, and researching their story has become something I continue to do. Watching videos of relatives testimonies through the USC Shoah Foundation, searching through Holocaust archives and collecting once lost names to expand my knowledge of our family tree, and trying to find out how my grandfather Bill Lurie’s parents (Shmuel and Dora) and brother (Jurek) were killed during the Shoah has become a personal responsibility.
I have also campaigned for education on the Holocaust in Australia, and today education on the Holocaust is advised in the National Curriculum and is compulsory in Victoria and New South Wales.
But how the Holocaust is taught also matters. There are concerns that the universalisation of the Holocaust has turned its memory from a lesson on hatred directed at Jews to “man’s inhumanity to man.” Consequently, Israel has been gaslit for its defensive war against Hamas by being labelled ‘Nazis’ who are committing ‘genocide’.
As Yossi Klein Halevi wrote in the Times of Israel, “The ease with which anti-Zionists have managed to portray the Jewish state as genocidal, a successor to Nazi Germany, marks a historic failure of Holocaust education in the West. This moment requires a fundamental rethinking of the goals and methodology of Holocaust education. By over-emphasizing the necessary universal lessons of the Holocaust, many educators too easily equated antisemitism with generic racism. The intention was noble: to render the Holocaust relevant to a new generation. But in the process, the essential lesson of the Holocaust – the uniqueness not only of the event itself but of the hatred that made it possible – was often lost.”
Fortunately, in Australia there are organisatons such as the Gandel Holocaust Studies Program, which are training Australian teachers in best practice ways to teach about the Holocaust. Such programs should be expanded. The Melbourne Holocaust Museum and Sydney Jewish Museum are also doing incredible work to educate school students about the horrors of the Shoah.
As Shoah survivors pass away it is also up to each of us. In an age where facts will likely continue to be considered “subjective”, and misinformation and disinformation becomes rife, we must hold on to the truth to honour not only the memory of victims and survivors of the Holocaust but to protect future generations of Jewish people.
Sharyn Kolieb is The AJN’s Editor-at-Large.
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