This 2017 year, Holocaust Memorial Day for the Martyrs and the Heroes will take place on May 4th.
I lost most of what could have been my family in the Holocaust – grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all perished, all I never knew.
Last year I visited Poland to find out that my late father’s father had 10 brothers and sisters and his mother 6 brothers and sisters, all murdered at the hands of maniacal Nazis, all I never knew about!
One in every three Jews in the world was exterminated.
My sister and I were born in Israel, to where my parents, Holocaust survivors, escaped.
I read, and read and read the speeches and sermons and editorials this gruesome event evokes, but for me there is only one answer and it is the unstinting support for the security and future of the state of Israel.
Only three years after the end of the Holocaust, Israel was reborn in the ancient homeland where the unbroken chain of Jewish survival, in spite of oppression, dislocation, murder and genocide, started in the city of Hebron, the burial place of the Jewish nation’s Forefathers.
In Europe the words of the Jewish martyrs, “Shma Israel” … “Hear oh Israel” were the last words uttered before the Nazis murdered them.
The land of Israel heard them; it offered succor and rescue to those who remained alive.
Today, 70 years after the worst human rights abuse the world ever knew and human beings perpetrated, I cringe when supporters of BDS movement, to boycott, divest and sanction Israel, or J Street, or any other serial bashers of Israel grow solemn at the mention of the Holocaust but are complicit in criticism and libels of Israel. These things weaken the Jewish State and by extension encourage violent anti-Semitism throughout the world, even in this wonderful corner of the Diaspora, the United States.
Damn their caterwauling tears and hypocrisy, it is repugnant. The only memorial and answer to the systematic extermination of 6,000,000 Jews is a safe and secured Israel, within the boundaries of the ancient homeland, promised to His people, where there has been a Jewish presence from time immemorial. The rest is just commentary, speechstery.
Opposite to love is not hate it is apathy, indifference!
