Distinguished guests,

Several months ago, I headed the Israeli delegation to the ceremony marking 65 years since the liberation of the death camps Auschwitz and Birkenau. The candle-lighting ceremony took place outside in front of the monument. It was 15 degrees celsius below zero, but it was still warmer than the terrible winter of 1944-1945 when temperatures ranged from 30 to 35 degrees below zero. We stood for about 30 minutes during the ceremony, well-dressed for the weather, but nevertheless we were freezing. Suddenly I understood a simple, chilling truth about millions of my brothers and sisters who ended up in that cursed place: those who didn’t burn, froze; and those who didn’t freeze were burned.

Several months prior, I had visited the Wannsee Villa in Berlin. When I was there, I saw the original invitation for the meeting of high-level Nazi officials, during which they decided on the destruction of the Jewish people. On the invitation that was sent by the Deputy Head of the SS was written: “The chief of the Reich main security office, Reinhard Heydrich, cordially invites you to a discussion about the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. Breakfast will be served at 09:00”.
This is how, in an elegant villa on the shore of a pastoral lake, over breakfast and glasses of cognac, 15 men sat and decided how to destroy our people. No one batted an eyelid; no one expressed any doubt regarding the mission, either its necessity or its justness. Immediately after the meal, they began their work to erase the seed of Abraham from the Earth.

As I was walking through the villa, moving from document to document, I felt myself becoming filled with helpless rage, and the feeling continued to grow until it became a flood. At the end of the tour, my German host asked me to write something in the guest book. I sat in the chair and the sadness and the anger rose up and started to overflow. And because of the storm of emotions I wrote three words: Am Israel Chai [the People of Israel live].

Tonight at Mount Herzl, I say it again: Am Israel Chai. The people of Israel will continue to live. It re-established its country, gathered its exiles, built its army, settled its homeland and reunited its capital, Jerusalem. “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people.” That is how David Ben-Gurion opened the Declaration of Independence. The State of Israel was born out of the ruins and the ashes, and today it impresses the entire world with the force of its creativity and innovation, with its advanced research and knowledge, with the momentum of its economy and with its free and democratic society.

Within several decades, the State of Israel has become one of the most advanced countries in the world: Israeli products help cure illnesses and feed millions of people; Israeli developments help irrigate fields and orchards on every continent; and Israeli ideas help save energy in every corner of the globe. Israel is a rich source of innovation for the world and is looking to the future.

Nevertheless, today we must ask the question: have the lessons of the Holocaust been learned? I believe that there are three lessons: fortify your strength, teach good deeds and fight evil.
The first lesson – fortify your strength – relates first and foremost to us, the people of Israel who were abandoned and defenseless when faced with waves of murderous hatred that rose against us time after time.

“In every generation there are those who stand against us.” And in this generation we must fortify our strength and independence so that we will be able to prevent the current enemy from carrying out its plan.

Fortifying our strength is the first condition for our existence.
At the end of the day, it is also a necessary condition to expanding the circle of peace with those neighbors who accept our existence.
The second lesson – teach good deeds – means accepting or rather teaching to accept the other and differing opinions. This is the recognition that is the foundation for the Jewish perspective that every man is created in G-d’s image and that every man has full rights to freedom, to life and to choosing his own path.

This is the essence of a free society. This is the basis that would prevent the growth of a Nazi ideology or any other fanatic ideology that preaches genocide and carries it out.

This is what we teach the children of Israel, which is a magnificent country, a beacon of tolerance in a dark and fanatical region.
But, ladies and gentlemen, this teaching of good deeds has a complementary side, and that is the third lesson of the Holocaust: fight evil. It is not enough to simply do good and be tolerant. A free society must ask itself what it will do when faced with the destructive forces of evil that seek to destroy and trample man and his rights.

There is no tolerance without boundaries and the boundary of tolerance must be outlined. And that is the answer that all free countries must define for themselves.

The historic failure of the free societies when faced with the Nazi animal was that they did not stand up against it in time, while there was still a chance to stop it.

And here we are today again witnesses to the fire of the new-old hatred, the hatred of the Jews, that is expressed by organizations and regimes associated with radical Islam, headed by Iran and its proxies.

Iran’s leaders race to develop nuclear weapons and they openly state their desire to destroy Israel. But in the face of these repeated statements to wipe the Jewish state off the face of the Earth, in the best case we hear a weak protest which is also fading away.
The required firm protest is not heard – not a sharp condemnation, not a cry of warning.

The world continues on as usual and there are even those who direct their criticism at us, against Israel.

Today, 65 years after the Holocaust, we must say in all honesty that what is so upsetting is the lack of any kind of opposition. The world gradually accepts Iran’s statements of destruction against Israel and we still do not see the necessary international determination to stop Iran from arming itself.

But if we learned anything from the lessons of the Holocaust it is that we must not remain silent and be deterred in the face of evil.
I call on all enlightened countries to rise up and forcefully and firmly condemn Iran’s destructive intentions and to act with genuine determination to stop it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

These are the three lessons of the Holocaust: fight evil, teach good deeds and fortify your strength.

My friends, where does our strength come from? From our unity, from our heritage, from our common past and future. We treasure our past and forge the path to our future.

We are not here by chance. We returned to this land because it is our land; we returned to Zion because it is our city. We are paving roads north and south, and transforming a barren land into a flourishing garden. This is our answer to those who seek our destruction.

As the prophet Isaiah said:
“Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”

By: Rabbi Emanuel Feldman

One rule of thumb by which to measure the significance of the Holocaust is that it clearly matters to the enemies of the Jewish people – so much so that many would like to blot out its memory entirely.

They are impatient with us: Why do you Jews dwell on the Holocaust? Why not forget it and go forward? The very same mindset that was not disturbed while six million were butchered now resents our remembering those same six million. Forget about it, they say, and move on. What good does it do to keep remembering it?

There are a number of reasons for these attempts to blot out and even to deny the Holocaust:

* Its memory gives spiritual strength to the Jewish people.

* It undergirds the existence of the State of Israel.

* It creates sympathy for the Jewish people.

* It makes heroes of the Jewish people who were able to live through such tragedy and not only survive but flourish.

* Because the deniers refuse to face the dark potential that lies within mankind and within themselves.

* And, perhaps primarily, because once the Holocaust is forgotten, their own complicity in it – at the very least by their silent acquiescence – will also be forgotten, and they will feel exonerated.

But the Holocaust matters very much because of the many lessons that are derived from this black period in history.

Man is not born good. He has to become good – by learning that there is another beside him and an Other above him.

Among these lessons is the fact that evil and unwarranted hatred are a reality that exists in our world. The human being has an infinite capacity for evil that, left unchecked, can destroy the world. The view that goodness is a built-in and natural quality in mankind is not only Pollyannaish, it is dangerous and untrue.

The Torah itself tells us that the “impulse of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Gen 8:21). Man is not born good. He has to become good – by forging his character, by bending his baser instincts, by learning that there is another beside him and an Other above him.

The Holocaust shows what can become of human beings when they permit the beast within them to control them.

It teaches us that we must be alert to the existence of evil, both in others and in our own selves. Once we are aware of its reality, we can work to uproot it. The mitzvot of the Torah are designed to help the spiritual qualities within us dominate the beast within.

Further, we learn from this tragedy that to be silent in the face of evil is to acquiesce in it, encourage it, and help it grow strong. History teaches us that evil triumphs when good people remain silent. But when good people rise up against evil, evil will ultimately perish and the good will prevail.

Never doubt the evil intentions of tyrants.

By appeasing Nazi Germany in the 1930′s, by turning a blind eye toward its policies of discrimination, hatred, and ultimately the wholesale murder of Jews, the so-called free world encouraged the Nazis to continue their evil ways – with the result that not only were six million Jews brutally killed, but countless others destroyed, and untold human suffering engendered. We made the mistake of not believing what they were saying. Early on, they stated precisely what their plans were. The world should not have been surprised.

One should never doubt the evil intentions of tyrants. Today, when we hear talk about destroying Israel and driving her people into the sea, it would be folly to discount it.

From the Holocaust we also learn that evil, hatred, and anti-Semitism are not always the result of ignorance, but that even a highly educated, cultured, and sophisticated society can fall under the sway of evil. Germany was a leader in science, art, education, literature, philosophy, music – but none of this cultural superiority was a guarantee against the cruelty and bestiality that marked its behavior. The guards at Auschwitz listened to Bach while their victims were gassed to death.

The Holocaust underscores a curious fact: whenever we find great evil in the world, it is invariably directed against the Jewish people. The worst tyrants in history have one goal in common: to destroy the Jews. Stalin and Hitler of the last century are only the most recent entries in the endless exhibition of virulent anti-Jewishness. Somehow, the enemies of freedom, peace, love, goodness, and morality have also been the enemies of the Jews.

Why do tyrants unleash their fury against the Jews? Because there is within Judaism a certain sense of sanctity and Godliness whose very existence is a challenge to the very essence of tyranny. Hatred of the Jew is actually hatred of God and the morality, ethics and self-discipline that He – through the Torah – has tried to introduce into the world.

A people is judged not by its friends but by its enemies. Though it is most painful, the Jews bear the enmity of the world’s tyrants with pride and courage. For this enmity only demonstrates that the Jew represents a different scale of values in the universe, and constitutes a formidable challenge to the dominion of evil.

Thus the Holocaust matters very much. Remembering it not only honors the martyrs who fell in the cause of the Jewish people, it also underscores the awareness that despite its ravages, we still flourish as a dynamic people. And this fortifies us and strengthens our faith in God’s promises about the eternity of the Jewish people.

Memory is an integral aspect of being alive, the glue of one’s self-identity. Memory is also an integral element in the life of a people, for a people that forgets its past has no future.

How much more so is this true of the Jews, who for most of history had no land, no flag, no armies, no protection. We had only our Torah, our God – and our national memory.

Because the Jews are a people that remembers, we never forgot our origins. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand fail…” says King David (Psalms 137:5). We never forgot Jerusalem, we never forgot our history. Had we forgotten, we would long ago have ceased to exist as a people. Wherever we wandered in our exile, our prayers have been directed towards Jerusalem. We do not forget, and even at the moments of our greatest joy – at our weddings – we shatter a glass to remind ourselves that as long as our Temple is not rebuilt and restored, our happiness is incomplete.

Even today, when we approach the remaining vestige of our ancient Temple, we rend our garments like those in mourning. And we have special days of fasting to mark the various stages of Jerusalem’s destruction – not because we wish to dwell on our past sadness, but because we know what happens when a people forgets its past. It is the Jewish national memory that partially explains the mysterious survival of our people despite all odds against it. That memory is an integral part of Jewish existence is seen by the frequency of its use in the Bible. The term zikaron, “remembrance”, appears over 20 times in the Five Books of Moses, and there are over 300 variations of the term zachor, “remember,” in the Bible.

The Holocaust reminds us of certain truths that, if forgotten, can destroy civilization.

So vital is it not to forget evil, that of the many commandments dealing with remembering, one of the most emphatic is the requirement to remember the tribe of Amalek who tried to destroy Israel in its wanderings in the Wilderness.

Why is it so crucial not to forget Amalek and to blot out its memory? Because Amalek represents the epitome of evil, the force that seeks to destroy every vestige of God in the universe, including the carriers of God’s teachings, the Jewish people. We are bidden never to forget this and to battle against it in every generation (Exod. 17: 14-16; Deut. 25:17). The spirit of Amalek still lives, and it was certainly its spirit that gave strength to the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
by: Rabbi Emanuel Feldman

The Holocaust reminds us of certain truths that, if forgotten, can destroy civilization. And it reminds Jews that the purpose of the Torah is to change man from a beast and transform him into a human being, and that only in connecting with God can evil be pre-empted in the world.

We forget it at our peril.

For more articles on the Holocaust, visit aish.com’s Holocaust Studies section.