Teaching About the Holocaust

Today is Yom HaShoah.

Last night in Hebrew Gimmel we practiced using numbers in Hebrew, which also meant practicing grammar in a gendered language. We played games and made up phone numbers and tested each other on hearing the numbers correctly. We practiced knowing the numbers without needing to count up to them (as in there are 6 ducks without needing to count the first 5 because the way we tend to learn numbers is in ascending order). We worked with numbers in the wild, in modern Hebrew sentences we could translate.

Numbers matter.

When we transitioned into our Yom HaShoah Memorial Service, in both Hebrew and English, we looked at maps with much bigger numbers. The number of Jews living in places like Italy and Poland and Morocco and Syria and in the whole world in 1930 … and today.

We learned a little more about Jews and Jewish life across Europe and the Middle East and North Africa in the 1920s and 30s. We looked closely at pictures of Chanukah parties and Purim costumes and Passover Seders and of kids playing and we saw ways we and those Jewish people of the past have a lot in common.

We remembered that antisemitism affects us and is not about us. That - like racism and homophobia and transphobia and hatred of anyone - hate lives in the person doing the hating. That hatred like this makes up reasons but is not because of reasons.

That means it’s our responsibility to do something about the hate and the biases and the suspicion and the lack of compassion or empathy when we feel it in us because it’s our problem - it’s about us. Our job to keep learning and to do something about the words or ideas that come out of us that have made up reasons.

However, we are not responsible for the hate and bias and suspicion and lack of compassion or empathy that is directed at us that lives in someone else. It affects us and is not about us.

It is our particular responsibility as Jews to remember the Jewish people who have been affected by antisemitism, to remember the vibrant Jewish lives - so much like ours - that were destroyed during the Holocaust, to remember their faces and their names and their stories. To remember that it was devastating, real, and that the traumas of the Holocaust reverberate in our own lives and communities. To grieve. To feel that loss.

To remember as well that hate spills over and spreads. That it was the Jewish people and it was also a lot of other people. There were stars and triangles and symbols inviting hate toward a mixed multitude during World War II. Some people used hate as an excuse - as a reason - for more hate.

And as much as it affected us and affects us still, being Jewish is and has always been about so much more than being hated.

Which is why we learn ALL of our history, and study all of our stories. Why we learn songs in Yiddish and Ladino and Hebrew. Why we make Jewish art and study Jewish art and learn about Jewish artists. Why we read books with Jewish characters by Jewish authors and talk about them in our Jewish book clubs.

Why we learn how to tell someone our phone number in Hebrew and how to write down their number correctly when they tell us theirs.

Because numbers matter and so does our language and most of all so does our ability to reach out and reach back to one another.

These are some of the ways we remember.